Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today by a very special guest, my absolute favorite person, Elizabeth Ferreira. Elizabeth, how are you doing today? Good.
I am glad to be back on the pod. Yeah, I'm so glad to have you here. We recently recorded an episode, which was a mailbag episode. We got a ton of questions from people. And one of the things that we got asked about most frequently... We didn't actually talk about during that episode because I wanted to do a full episode on it. We got a bunch of questions that were about fearful attachment, feeling like people were having a hard time inside of their relationships.
How have you progressed around these various issues, which right now are very present for you in your life? And this got me thinking about attachment wounds and attachment trauma in general, which is a huge topic and it's something that you really explore inside of your practice with people as well as a somatic therapist and somebody who focuses on complex PTSD.
But I thought it made sense to just start with your own experience a little bit as somebody who identifies as having a more fearful attachment style. Yeah. What do you want to know? The classic Elizabeth that, like, turned the question back on me. Okay, what do I want to know? What did that feel like in the past? Like, what does it feel like to have a fearful attachment style? What does that mean?
And then where have you been able to go with it? Yeah. So for me, fearful is also disorganized. Yeah. And basically what it feels like is that. That whole domain of like attachment, that sort of part of our nervous system is fraught with discomfort. It can be felt when people energetically come towards you, and it can also be felt when people energetically move away from you. It's sort of like it's never quite right.
No matter how far or how close somebody gets, it's always uncomfortable. To me, what it sort of feels like is that when someone comes toward me down that domain of attachment, I have to resist this sort of... reflex to kind of push back. I think I described it to you as sort of like a blanket kind of going over your head and being smothered. So your instinct is to push away from that, but-
When you're working with like your own sort of attachment style and you're disorganized, you have to resist that impulse. So even when you're like in connection, I'm still working really hard to like resist that. reflex or that impulse to like push away, like get away from me. Yeah. And I think that's an experience that people have a very difficult time articulating. We get a lot of questions in the podcast in general about disorganized attachment styles.
People spend a lot of time creating content about anxious styles and avoidant styles. But for people who have more of a trauma history, it's very common to have a more fearful style. The easiest way to understand attachment, at least that I've found, comes from work that was done in the early 90s. And it basically simplifies attachment down to two questions. Can I trust you? Or do I have a positive or negative view of other people?
And can I trust me? Do I have a positive or negative view of myself? Those are two yes, no questions. For some people, it might be a little bit more of a maybe, but let's simplify it down to yes or no. And so if you combine those two yes, no questions, you get four possible answers. If I can trust you.
and I can trust myself, I'm pretty much securely attached. That's how I feel most of the time. If I can trust me, but I can't really trust you, that's more avoidant. If I can trust you, but I can't really trust me, that's a little bit more anxious. And then if I can't really trust either, if approaching is sort of fraught, but avoiding is also sort of fraught, well, that's a more disorganized attachment style.
Because both of these domains, the domain of connection and the domain of solitude, are both uncomfortable for a person, it can be really, really hard to work with because it's like, where do I start? It all feels bad. I don't know. Is that reflective of your experience? Do you think that captures that? What my experience is like is that I'm aware of healthy connection or attachment.
And there are even people in my life now who objectively I understand are safe and objectively I understand, but it's there anyway. It's always there. And that can be very challenging because moving into connection with people inherently means that I'm going to have to be uncomfortable. It's not easy for me. It's always effort. It's always work. It's always this elaborate sort of negotiation I'm doing with myself.
of checking in okay I can trust myself I'm tracking this appropriately okay I can't trust this person right like I'm having to sort of parent myself constantly through that because my impulses or instincts are I know they come from being traumatized. So I'm constantly having to fight against that. So, let's back up that and...
talk about how that kind of gets into a person. Sometimes these are referred to as attachment wounds. These different injuries that a person might experience that might lead them to feel either uncomfortable with other people in closeness or uncomfortable by themselves more in distance. Would you mind kind of painting a picture of what that can look like? Again, kind of thinking about the whole domain of attachment. That's an entire range of experience you can have.
in your nervous system, so to speak. If you have been harmed in that specific domain, then you're going to have an attachment wound. So for example, My own personal experience was that I had sort of the Jungian archetype of the devouring mother, like a high degree of enmeshment. high degree of me having to attune to my mom like no but i wasn't allowed to have boundaries it had to just be like i was just like open available thing all the time so now whenever i feel someone
reach towards me, all of that gets activated. All of that material, that wounding kind of like pops up for me. And I'm having to kind of hold that and regulate it and be with it at the same time I'm now trying to connect with somebody. And sometimes I can do it and sometimes I can't. Yeah, so that's what you're describing as super common for people. Super common to have some group of experiences tied to their family of origin most of the time. For me...
any attachment injuries that I had were more about my relationship with other kids than they were with my primary attachment figures. But for most people, it's primary attachment figure, mom, dad, whoever's raising you. And it's so difficult in part because the medicine is very painful. We heal attachment wounds, we deal with attachment injury by finding secure, stable, nurturing people to connect with these days.
Sometimes this can be a cognitive process. Most of the time it's a feeling process. It's a relational process. So if you can't find those people to attach to, that can be very, very difficult for people. Not everybody has a supportive group of people around them.
Sometimes that's frankly what you're paying a therapist for, is to be a safe, secure attachment figure for you in a world where you just don't get a lot of that alternatively. So a lot of people come to you to start... working on these kinds of issues and develop more space inside of themselves so they can be more comfortable both in closeness, intimacy, and distance being on their own.
Is there a typical sort of arc to that work that somebody does that you've developed a familiarity with over time? Does it have a typical path? Yeah, so in the beginning, usually there is a lot of what I would describe as protection. And it takes quite a bit of time to... get buy-in from that protection that, oh, this person is really safe. When we're working with an attachment wound, you can't just be like, you're safe. Safety is earned and trust is earned.
And it's earned through repeated experiences of being attuned to appropriately, receiving co-regulation, and that kind of... modeling compassion for for the protection like it was there for a good reason and making everything kind of explicit in the space then once that happens then it sort of becomes this playground in a way of testing. Okay, how honest can I be? How much can I lean forward? How much vulnerability can I actually like place here?
And being a therapist is a part of that process of play and testing and doing it in a very authentic way. where you are meeting that person and that bid and that point of connection or attachment and creating the reparative experience so for example Say someone similar to my kind of attachment wound and system of enmeshment. I need to learn that it's okay for me to tell somebody no and they're not going to blow up on me.
I need to have the felt experience that I'm allowed to have my full range of emotion, even if it's protest, even if it's some anger, and that to be met appropriately. To go, oh, this is extremely tender, sacred, vulnerable stuff. And I have to be almost perfect in how I meet this. And working with attachment wounds requires a high degree.
of attunement. Because any small kind of miss, like we're beyond the domain of like, oh, the good enough parent. No, now you have to be the perfect parent. And when you miss it, and because you can never be perfect. You got to own it. You got to name it. And then you got to move into repair. And so then after that, what ends up happening is that that domain of attachment.
gets more space like you were describing with your therapist. And then it becomes safer to try that out in the real world. Like if you can do it under the safety of this space. you can do it out in the real world. And that's the final piece is moving out into the real world and experiencing the normal range of misses, misattunement, not quite good enough.
And still being able to tolerate that to form a connection with somebody. Are you comfortable talking about this fairly personally? Yeah. So let's stay with enmeshment. And this general feeling like you get really sucked into other people. You lose track of what's going on in you. You enter placating mode. All of that. What helped you work with that tendency inside of yourself?
Well, it first started getting a therapist who could actually attune to me, which was a missed experience. I've never really had, prior to that therapist, anyone really attuned to me. And that kind of opened up, oh, this is new. And wow, this should have happened when I was a kid, kind of that realization. And then through my own...
kind of trauma work, becoming more and more aware through that work in that journey of what my attachment wounds really are. And a part of that is also recognizing the almost like... reflexive impulse or instinct that you have. So for me, because my mother was fairly unstable, emotionally dysregulated, very chaotic, kind of overwhelming. My body knows how to be with that type of person, but it knows how to be with that type of person by self-abandoning my own needs and my own self.
So it was recognizing that and starting to get curious, oh, am I doing this? because I'm at choice? Or am I doing this because this is how I was trained? And it's sort of a Pavlovian response that I'm having. And once I got there, Then it became the quest of having limits, having boundaries and saying no, which is really hard for me because. I still have a panic response associated with that where I feel if I take care of myself and I tell people no, that something really bad is gonna happen.
Yeah, so the other pull of that, if you are that person who can get really sucked in to another person's content, then that means that approaching in general... is quite threatening because you know that there's just this gravitational pull to that codependency and so on. And that's part of being disorganized because you...
You get very leery of opening yourself up to people because you haven't learned how to have any psychic boundaries internally. So what it means to be in connection with that type of past experience is... it's all consuming yeah if i let you in you you you completely take over and so that leads to some forms of isolation where it's like i would rather be by myself
then be overtaken again. Yeah. And we talked about this a little bit during the recent episode we did on pursuers and distancers. I recorded it with my dad. It's really helpful to understand that avoidance is typically an anxiety coping strategy. But we call it anxious attachment and avoidant attachment, but the truth is they're both anxious. Because the avoidant person, what they're anxious about is that intimacy.
One of the reasons they might be anxious about it is because they've gotten really sucked into other people's bullshit in the past, and they don't want to do it again. So both ways, there's that kind of underlying anxiety, and it's for more fearfully attached people. where that can really get supercharged because you're kind of losing either way. It's a sort of damned if I do, damned if I don't. Yeah. And attachment and connection is really complicated. And when you've had trauma in that domain,
Things that I think most people take for granted become very complicated and hard. And I think for me, in my experience, what's also challenging is that so much of my... fundamental relationships did not give me any space to practice things like disagreeing, like standing up for yourself.
how to like really state a boundary and be like, you will not cross this boundary and being able to kind of push back on people who try to push up against that boundary. Like I don't have much of that at all. So when I'm already feeling kind of triggered by somebody. Like I can tell I'm going to need a lot of boundaries with this person. It feels so overwhelming because when I get activated in that way.
Then the fearful happens. I can't trust myself and I can't trust you because I can't trust myself to be able to maintain my voice to tell you to f*** off. And then also, I can't trust myself to not say f***. off when maybe what would be more appropriate is don't talk to me about that like it gets so charged inside of myself that then it's like that person is not worth
the amount of work and effort that I have to do. That's kind of like the story that comes in. And then that avoidance comes in. It's like I can see already how much pain that's going to cause me and how much work I'm going to have to do. No, not worth it. I don't like you enough to do that. Yeah, and then you're in the world of constant isolation. Yeah. And you're not getting the practice. You're not getting the kinds of reparative experiences that could lead to some sort of a better outcome.
Also, one of the questions we get all the time is, I have these attachment injuries, and therefore the relationships that I have, the friendships, I have, the day-to-day interactions that I have, end up not being reparative. I didn't develop those tools that you're speaking to. So why would I expose myself to these opportunities for growth, but they really just kind of feel painful. They never go well. And I feel like I'm just relearning the same sort of old bad habits.
I'm wondering for starters, was that your experience? And if it was, how did you start working around that? I mean, I think that's like the battle you have as someone who's got a disorganized attachment style is there is a part of you. that can objectively know this is supposed to be healthy. This is supposed to be the opportunity for the healing experience. You know, this is your growth edge and all of that.
But there's a somatic experience of so much overwhelm that you don't have access to that sometimes. It's really challenging to justify inside myself feeling like in many ways reliving my trauma for somebody that I don't even like that much. Sure, yeah. You know? You have a peripheral relationship with them, whatever it is, yeah. It's really difficult for me to get my parts to cooperate when inside myself I'm like, but I don't like this person.
but I don't want to do that. It puts me in contact with the parts of myself that are very young that were like, but you said you would never do this again. You said you would never put us in this situation again. And so this is still like really challenging for me because I hear those little parts inside of myself that every time. I'm reaching for the potential of a connection or an attachment. Those parts are like, but wait, how is this different?
To me, it's having that active choice of going like, but I like this person and I want this. connection with this person and instead of feeling the parts in me go like but you said never again Elizabeth you said you would never put us in this situation again instead of that being heard my younger parts are like curious. They're like, can we trust this person? The internal tone shifts and gives me a little bit more room.
to take risk in ways that I wouldn't be able to, especially if there's a person who is activating the parts that are like over my dead body. Yeah. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment. This might seem surprising but I have always struggled to eat enough vegetables. Ever since I was a kid I just didn't want to eat them and although I've worked on that in my adulthood it's still not my favorite thing to do.
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Adobe Express is the quick and easy create anything app. It's my go-to for making my business stand out. From videos and social posts to flyers and logos. Search for Adobe Express to find out more and use it for free. Now, back to the show. So you kind of alluded to IFS there. You talked about younger parts. I know you do a lot of work inside of an IFS framework, and you use that model a lot.
And particularly with attachment wounds, these are often located at a moment in time. Kind of experience that we had growing up when we were in a more... more vulnerable developmental stage. We didn't have as many resources as we do right now. We hadn't learned as much, whatever was going on. And whether you're doing this by yourself or you're trying to do therapy with somebody.
Accessing that material, talking to those parts, having that kind of dialogue with them can be very thorny stuff for people. It's quite fraught. You've talked with me a little bit about some of the things that... some of the tools that can be helpful to people, a little bit about some of the work that you do with people. But I'm wondering how you approach that kind of like a dialogue with somebody, whether it's how you've approached like talking to yourself about that.
or having that kind of a conversation where you have a part that goes over my dead body and trying to kind of get on the team with it, for lack of a better way of putting it. How does somebody go about doing that? Well, first you have to be able to tolerate holding those parts. There's a lot of dysregulation that comes when you start to move into that attachment.
domain and all the parts that are in that space. Because that's also where some of the most vulnerable parts exist. Our bodies are built for connection. They're not built for isolation. And yet if you're someone like me who's had developmental trauma, there is an entire network of adaptive strategies that pull towards isolation because I learned at a very young age.
It is not safe being around people. The only time I'm ever truly safe is when I am completely by myself. That's when I can relax. That's when I can have enough space for me. But within that... I think about when I connect to my little one inside, when I would isolate when I was little, I would isolate into these fantasies of having a really... nurturing, attuned, caring person talking to me. Just someone talking to me and showing interest in my inner world.
And I would have these elaborate inner conversations with these characters I created, kind of manifesting an attuning, reflective, co-regulating person. And so it's emotional kind of contacting that part because like, wow, how adaptive little me was to invent a safe person. And the irony, that person was myself, a part within myself. But that's how I survived my childhood, was I escaped into these elaborate fantasy worlds where at the core people just cared.
for me people just cared about me and i think that's like the hardest part when you start to work with someone is there's always that inner wounded child that just wanted to someone to love them that was so desperate for someone to hold them and be with them. And that's really the one when there's enough safety and containment and rapport between you and the client or the therapist and the client where...
that young one gets to start to be in the room. And that's where that high degree of attunement comes in. Because you have to notice. And that's the hardest part. You have to notice. When the little ones start to peek around the corner, metaphorically speaking, and they start to show up in the space. And from there, is it just kind of creating a secure container?
Is it doing certain kinds of things with the part? I'm curious how you kind of like at that point when you feel like there's a little bit of an opening, you feel like there's a bit of an investigation, like where does it go from there? Well, it almost always leads to like a high degree of emotionality. Sure. Yeah. You pop the lid on something. You pop the lid. It can be.
very intense it can feel very overwhelming because like it can be a lot when depending on when the pain or the trauma happened the two-year-old rolls in the room And you as the therapist have to be very mindful of, oh, this is the two-year-old. How would you attune to a two-year-old?
You know, how would you reassure? How would you bring safety and comfort to a two-year-old? And a lot of it is about allowing the person to have the experience that they've been suppressing for maybe their whole life. Whether it's the biggest cry they've ever had or a scream or letting the part talk. What's the fear in there? What is that part holding?
And that's unique to each individual. You never know what it's going to be. But I kind of try in a very caring way just to kind of be like, yeah, we have to have space to be messy. Like we got to make space for the mess. Yeah, and a lot of the time when you're first starting to access that kind of material, you're going back down the rabbit hole that way, people are really not okay with whatever pops up. No. And they're...
Again, sort of stealing the framework from IFS here, there might be a manager part or a firefighter part, sometimes also called a protector part. I kind of prefer the word protector, but who am I to argue with Richard Schwartz? But, you know, these different aspects of ourselves that can kind of come online and either apply an intense self-judgment. that then takes the person out of that inquiry or is like very distracting and kind of like shiny object over here. Yeah, I work with that.
Yeah, I'm wondering how somebody sees that happening, they're feeling that inside of themselves. How do you work with that? Well, when the protective part rolls in, I mean, the protective part knows you better than I do. And so it's saying, hey, this is a lot and this is too much right now. Okay. And so then we back off. So you trust it. We trust it. Nice. And then we back off. And, you know, it's like, okay, yeah, that was a lot. Protective part rolling in.
Let's just take a pause. Let's give it some room You know, it's very very slow work because if I were to inquire Because we're not working with just any type of trauma, we're working with attachment trauma. If I ask a question, that's a form of leaning towards, that's leaning down the attachment domain, which may be the very thing that's implicitly triggering the person.
So then I got to just stay exactly where I am. When the protective part rolls in, it's like, you need to stop. And that doesn't mean leaning back either. It means wherever I've landed. Just stay there. When you're starting to open the door to those younger parts, those more vulnerable emotional experiences, for a lot of people, a ton of self-criticism comes.
And I'm wondering if you approach that self-criticism in a similar way. Do you just create space for it? Do you enter a process with it? How do you think about it? I think of it as a part. Okay, as a part, yeah. And when I'm in that space of working with attachment wounds, I'm listening to all of the parts. Because this is some... Yeah, I believe this. In my experience, this is the most vulnerable work, and this is where you can also really hurt somebody. When you've gained enough safety.
that now the little children start to come into the room, those are the ones that are part of that attachment piece. It's... such tender, careful, precise work. Because if I get it wrong, if I start to like say someone starts to be more aggressive, if I meet that with aggression, That's another moment that, like you were saying earlier, you can kind of like strengthen whatever the attachment wound is.
You know, like, oh, yeah, there's no space for my anger. So yet again, bam. So I'm never going to let it out again. So that's what I mean by you could really hurt somebody if you're not. really attuned and really paying attention to what's happening. And it's why when we're working with attachment, we have to move very, very slowly because I need to
kind of understand you and I need to understand your part so that I can attune to the subtle shifts that are happening when that young one comes in. So I'm thinking a little bit here about what people can do on their own.
Of course, it's always great to have a good therapist who's really thoughtful about this sort of thing, but not everybody has a great therapist who's really thoughtful about this sort of thing. But there are a lot of people who want to explore how to get more flexibility inside of their relationships, which is another way that we can talk about this.
These wounds make us quite brittle in how we relate to other people. We need things to be a specific kind of way in order for us to maintain our comfort or to maintain our... equanimity or equilibrium, however you want to put it. And I'm wondering what you think people can do on their own, if anything, to start to get more of that space.
Well, first you need to really let your parts know what it means to be in relationship. Being in relationship means you are agreeing to be changed and transformed by the other person. And if you're not willing to do that you're not in a relationship is there a way that you talked to yourself about this that helped you
What was helpful for me was to understand that when we start to move into attachment and connection, we all revert back to being kids. We're all kids. And most of the time, we're our most... wounded version of those kids but deep down what does a kid really want they want to play they want to play they want to feel safe they want to imagine, explore, right? There's a degree of like fun that needs to happen. So within that, what helped me was seeing if I could see the inner child.
in the people that were trying to form connections and attachments to me. And checking in if I could hold a space inside of myself for that. Which is a little different than having that reflex of just, you know, like placating or fawning or, okay, being in relationship means you have like full access to like all of me. It's understanding that this is hard for almost everybody. And when we take a risk in either stating a need or asking what we want or going, hey, this really hurt me.
moving into repair, all of those things, is that all of that is really people trying to keep it safe for their inner kids. And me... really protecting my little kids inside by deciding who gets access to me and who doesn't. And so just kind of having that frame.
kind of helped me gain some space with like that part of me that can go like over my dead body is this gonna happen again yeah yeah and it's like but they're but but they're a kid yeah yeah it can kind of take the sting out of it a little bit I think a huge piece of this is just think about the person who's causing the wound. Most of the time it's an adult, right? It's a big, scary adult. You're a small, vulnerable kid. They know the right way. You don't.
You're a child, you're totally dependent on them. And a huge part of becoming an adult is realizing that the adults are making it up as they're going along too. And no one really has the answers here. And it is all uncertain and unstable. And we're all just kind of trying to figure it out as we go. But if you can find a way of relating that's about conceptualizing the other person as just another kid rolling around.
So they're not so much in that position of spooky authority, but they're instead somebody who can really be a little friend. And I think it's just a great way of thinking about it that could make those kinds of relationships more accessible for people who really struggle with this. I want to give a preface though because this could be a slippery slope. It's important to be wise with who you offer that reframe to. Sure.
Again, because the strategies that have kept us safe, the parts that have their responses, have those responses for good reason. So even within myself... There are some people who activate my really strong protective parts. And it's not helpful for me to try and... view that person as like a kid or or be like oh but they're this it's like no something is happening
that is activating my protective parts. Yeah, and that reframe essentially offers more closeness. It offers more intimacy. And so why would you do that with somebody who's not a safe person? Exactly. So I just want to give that kind of caveat that it's really... important when you have attachment trauma to pay attention to your protective parts because they are attuning to something very real and very important.
And so also a part of my practice is I really listen to those parts. In the past, I tried to push past them. I would try to just like corral them and like... force myself into situations that i was completely overwhelmed in because i was like well this is supposed to be healthy yeah this is what i'm supposed to be doing but it was just re-traumatizing and in the long run it actually
strengthens the somatic responses of my protectors where sometimes I feel like I'm going to throw up or I get so dissociated that I feel like I might pass out. Like I get so... overwhelmed because my parts are like no like we are tracking stuff that is unsafe you're not listening to us so we will literally like pull the rug out from under you
Yeah, I think this is a great point because so much of the intervention starts with harm reduction most of the time for most people. So the first intervention around attachment wounds... is not stacking more attachment wounds on top of the ones that you already have, right? So if you're consistently entering situations where you're consistently selecting people who are just not great partners for you for whatever reason, whether it's friendship partners or work partners or life partners.
The first step of this whole thing is trying to distance yourself from those kinds of relationships so you can do some of the work that from there you might be able to reenter other relationships that are more supportive, more healthy, more conducive to you. So yeah, I think it's a huge piece of the whole thing.
And it's kind of returning to that disorganized attachment style, which means I don't trust myself and I don't trust other people. You have to first repair the trust with yourself, which means you got to listen to those protective parts. say this is enough this is too overwhelming no yeah you have to go okay no I love that not happening today this is a great point so you're starting with repairing that relationship with yourself
And I think that's totally linked to something you've mentioned a couple of times already today. And you also, we talked about a little bit during the mailbag episode, but I think this is the perfect time to explore this in more detail, which is this protest part, which you've said a few times, like healthy anger.
Anger is not even really the right word. I think protest is actually a better word, but we can experience it as being a kind of anger because this is assertiveness. This is about expressing boundaries. It's about... seeing yourself clearly, getting in touch with your interior, having the sense for your own wants and needs.
It's the ability to fight back and defend. Yeah, defend the whole thing. It's that protection partner. It's getting kind of on the same side as your protectors, if you want to kind of put it that way. Have you found that there are things, particularly for people who tend to be... enmeshed, overwhelmed, really sucked into other people that help them get in touch with that sense of protest inside or kind of like on the same team with it? Well, what I have found...
You know that phrase, well, I sat with my anger long enough for it to reveal itself as grief or sadness? Yeah. When you're working with a specific type of attachment wound, Often you sit with the sadness long enough until it's... Until it gets pissed. Until you realize, oh, you're not sad at all. You are pissed. Yeah, for sure. Because... A part of this is you weren't allowed to have those psychic boundaries.
Your parent could just come in and wreak havoc and do whatever the hell they wanted inside of you, and you just had to be okay with it. You had to be obedient. You had to say yes. You had to whatever. And when... that has harmed you the correct response is to be mad yeah like it's also recognizing wrongdoing yeah to some extent like getting real about it yeah totally like how dare you step into my house
and track mud everywhere. How dare you come in to my young developing nervous system and make life so f***ing hard for me? Because you failed. Yeah, and it's... It's interesting because we talk all the time about compassion for others, compassion for self, all of that kind of stuff. In my experience, when people try to start with often the arc of it for people, particularly people who consume.
mental health content, is that there's this early attempt to start with kind of pure compassion, pure understanding, pure compassion, like, okay, I just want to feel good for all beings. And it doesn't work.
until they're able to get to the clear seeing frustrated whether it's like a full-on pissed off like you're describing or it's just this really sharp recognition of reality as it was clearly seeing it hook line and sinker the whole thing just being able to step back and go wow yeah that was wild From there, sometimes people are able to go through a process with it that ends in some kind of a compassion, often more self-compassion.
But it's really hard to get there without experiencing the normal, natural feelings that you're describing of being pissed, being angry, working through those feelings that are associated with it. Well, again, to return to that, we got to learn to trust ourselves. And anger is the truth teller. Anger is the force that says, wait a minute, I didn't deserve this. I don't deserve to be treated this way. This is what happened. And that was f***ed up.
And no wonder I respond in this way, because that was really messed up. My body was actually spot on. It wasn't safe, you know? And so it's, again... connecting to our truth and not trying to sugarcoat it or lay over this guild of you know just be compassionate like no sometimes you have to get mad And you got to give space for your anger because often there was no space when you were a kid for you to be mad. Yeah. So if you're working with somebody who's really keeping a lid on that.
and you've got a good read as a therapist, you've worked with them for a while, and you're like, wow, you are really called, well, you're like cognitively bypassing your anger or whatever it is that somebody's doing. What do you do to help them kind of connect with that a little bit more? I don't do anything. Just wait. You just got to wait. Wait it out. You just got to wait. People are thinking about this on their own and they're like, yeah, I can feel that that's inside of me.
But I feel like I can't get it past like here. And for those in audio who are not watching the video, I was gesturing to like the base of my throat, which I think is like where it sits for a lot of people. But it won't come out. Is there anything that... that can help somebody somatically kind of get in touch with that or is that again just a waiting game it's a waiting game okay like again we can't ignore the fact that
When you're in therapy, you are in a form of relationship, which is a form of attachment, which is a form of connection, which is triggering when we have attachment wounds. So just sitting... in the room with somebody else is already really activating and a lot is already happening, whether or not it's explicitly said. For people who can tolerate that and who over time more trust gets involved and a part of that is because I'm listening to your protective parts.
I'm modeling, yes, you should pay attention to this. Yes, you should trust this. This is saying something important. Let's get curious about it. Can we talk about it, right? What inevitably happens is what's supposed to be contacted will come forward. It's like a blooming that kind of happens. And it happens.
based on the degree of the therapeutic relationship. If I were to try to do something, that, no, it's not going to happen with attachment trauma. Because it's, again, I'm moving to maybe two in. on something and people who've had attachment trauma are super sensitive to any kind of movement on that domain of attachment so it's about allowing, being really okay with whatever shows up, and reflecting back and noticing, being that like active witnesser. And then inevitably.
Kind of happens with everybody. There's this little moment where most of the time people cry first and you can see it. And there's enough space. And then you ask the question. What are you feeling right now? What's in the sadness? And that's usually like, oh, I feel disgust I feel mad I feel like I want to and it's like yeah let's make some space for that yeah
We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. Now, back to the show. So, do you mind if I ask you some pretty personal questions, Elizabeth? Because the way that a lot of people are approaching this fundamentally is about finding a romantic relationship or about feeling like they can be able to get to a place of more secure attachment.
inside of their very intimate friendships, their very close friendships. As somebody who's coming from that more fearful style, who when we first started seeing each other, had not done serious therapy around any of this. When you were kind of beginning to engage with our relationship, were there things that you felt like you wanted to do differently or like you did do differently that ended up really helping you out? Yeah.
So when we first started dating, I was totally unaware that I had anything. I was unaware that I had trauma. I was unaware I had ADHD. I knew I had PMDD. By the time I met you, I was really curious about what happens if I just totally let somebody in. What happens if I really let myself want this? Prior to you, I think most people would have described me as avoidant because I would always keep a part of myself removed from every interaction with people.
You know, with you, I just honestly like I remember being just at this place where I was quite miserable and I was not convinced I was going to make it to 30. So I thought. Like, screw it. Squeeze the juice. Give it all you got, Elizabeth, even if it's painful, even if it makes you sick. And the truth is, is that our relationship didn't feel good for me when we first started dating.
I was highly anxious. Sure. I was constantly in this state of fear because I was letting myself like you and letting myself getting attached to you. that you were just gonna vanish or leave. And I remember there being a lot of moments when we would be together and
I would be like, okay, Elizabeth, if this is the last time you get to be with this person, just really enjoy it. And that's how I kind of treated every- date or moment we were together i was all like yeah this could be over at any moment because he could be done with me so just like fully be in the present moment well for starters that's very sweet and
really quite brave also. And I think that's sort of an under discussed part of the whole thing for people who have attachment wounds. You need to be very, very brave to have been hurt in a situation and then re-enter that situation. Like bottom line, that takes a lot of courage to be able to do that. Particularly when we're talking about our most intimate, most vulnerable material.
I don't know if there was anything that helped you do that or if it was a certain kind of like, well, might as well or how you kind of got to that feeling that like helped you go there. In that highly vulnerable way. Well, I mean, it kind of comes down to what I said earlier. I really liked you. Yeah. You know, we joke all the time. I love you, but I like you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally.
But there's so much power in liking someone because you're drawn to them. There is a force beyond your trauma responses that is driving you. through those because you're like, oh my God, like I really like this person. And like I said, I think a part of being in relationship is you're committing to being changed and transformed. And when I met you and as our relationship went on, it became very clear to me like, oh, I got to do a lot of changing. And I think a lot of people can hear that and go.
you're supposed to accept her. Yeah, just as they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. If you can't tolerate me on my worst day, you don't deserve me on my best day. Yeah, all of that. And I'm like, I get that. And also, you had to change a lot too. Yeah. It's a mutual change adventure, kids. That's what we're doing here. Yeah. Before you, I lived on this little island that nobody could reach me on. And then one day, you were on a boat.
And I was like, oh, wow, that looks like a pretty good boat. And so I swam out and we started building a connection there, like in between our two islands, so to speak.
For a time, I was able to go back. But the thing that helped me was you were always there. You were always there on that boat. Yeah, the consistency. Very consistent. Very like... happy when i was there very like hey you know like oh okay cool and then what ends up happening over time is part of like being changed is that boat in the middle gets bigger
you build off of it and that's where you know the collaboration and relationship comes in that's where you kind of can't just be this like eternally like selfish person like You know, you're in a relationship. You got to be giving too. You know, like all of that starts to come in. And then also like it returns to the safety piece.
How do I need to be so that your young parts feel safe? And then how do you need to be so that my young parts feel safe? Yeah. So it's in this weird way, like we're both being the adults, but we're both being the kids at the same time. So instead of any friendship or relationship or whatever, there are going to be moments where things kind of go sideways. Yeah. And if you're somebody who has these kinds of attachment wounds that we're talking about, those moments can be very painful.
and very disorganizing. And we had plenty of our own bumps and bruises as well, even as two very psychoeducated people who really like each other and also really love each other and all of that good stuff. And I was far from a perfect partner around a lot of this stuff. I mean, I had plenty of my own learning and exploring inside of myself to do around.
suite of different issues. And I say that because I think it would be very easy as somebody listening to this or like watching this to be like, well, sure, it sounds great if you have this like idealized partner. But I don't have an idealized partner. I don't have a partner at all. And so I just want to say, A, I was not an ideal partner. And because that is not a thing. Did my best, but everybody messes up.
And B, this is absolutely stuff that you can do inside of the domain of a friendship or whatever else. We all have relationships with people. Very few people are truly isolated. Anyways, so when those breaks of rapport happen, that's really tough.
So as somebody who's coming from that kind of like vulnerability around breaks of rapport, I mean, I was there for a lot of them. You made it through. You know, we kept going. We were able to repair and make it better. What kind of helped you with that? Particularly, what were you doing inside of yourself? I was letting myself be messy in front of you so that you could witness the storm that I have to deal with all the time. It was a degree of revealing.
myself to you yeah and you were smart about how you did that also you were not you didn't listen to my protective parts yeah yeah you didn't just blow the doors off you weren't coming in without scaling me appropriately or preparing me. I had context. And I just say that again because we aren't saying here like just kind of go in guns blazing one day. Yeah.
Yeah, and I think that all of that stuff was also a big piece of why you were successful with it and why it worked out for you because you were very smart about it. And also what I would add to that. When my protective parts would show up in our relationship, you listened to them and you took them seriously. And instead of fighting with them, you got curious about the need that was actually being missed. And you took that work on inside yourself of, okay, how do I learn the skill?
to be able to hear what Elizabeth is actually trying to say when I'm in a state of, I can't trust myself, and then I also can't trust you. Totally right on. And also there was... There's something huge that happened at some point in our relationship where you let good enough be good enough at some point. So what I mean by that is that it's really easy when you're in that state for nothing to be good enough. Yeah.
And I was, you know, doing my best at a lot of different times, but I was ham-fisted, or I didn't quite, I hadn't yet figured out exactly what you needed, or I was like trying to solve the problem rather than be with the emotion, you know, all of the classic stuff. But somewhere in there, it felt like you became, I don't know a way to put it really, like you got better at internalizing and feeling like my intent.
like kind of the heart that was behind something, even if the wrapping paper like wasn't quite right. And I don't know, does that sound right to you? Is there? Yeah, but what allowed me to do that? was you cultivated enough space inside yourself to hold my experience with yours. Instead of trying to bypass my experience because it was a lot. You got really good about just holding that space for me.
And then that space allows me to regulate enough to then be able to get to that point. And you can really see how this gets a little more complicated. when you're doing it without necessarily the presence of that really obvious supportive relationship. Because you need to develop the capacity essentially to offer these things to yourself that are not being offered to you by that secure, stable attachment figure.
And that's really hard. That's where maybe more of the parts work can come into it for people. That's where some of those developmental steps can happen for somebody that then support them in getting into.
the kind of more stable friendship or more stable romantic relationship that can then kind of open the door to a different kind of work that can be done. Yeah, and what I'd say kind of just to include in that is that The more work you do with your parts, you start to kind of understand the stuff that you can do yourself and the stuff that is absolutely necessary.
to have another person do with you. I remember early on in our relationship, you would kind of be like, why can't you just be more positive with yourself? Have the inner cheerleader. And I was like, what the are you even talking about? Like, I needed to have... Taking in the good was not really a thing for you early on. No, it wasn't. But, like, it was because developmentally, I never had that reflected or mirror to me. Yeah, we hadn't gone there. Yeah. And so...
A part of that, too, was you recognizing, oh, this fundamental building block just isn't there. It's actually harming her when I'm telling her, why can't you just... yeah because it feels like i'm not taking you seriously yeah i'm not i'm not coming into it from i'm not meeting you where you are that's it so kind of like to take that concept and then
kind of make it more broad outside of just like a romantic relationship, is again, you have to be able to listen to your protective parts. Your protective parts will let you know when someone is safe and when someone is not safe. Your protective parts will let you know when, hey, we're giving you a little bit of room to try something with this person because we can feel this person is trying.
They may not do it perfectly, but they're trying, right? And tolerating that, learning how to be like, okay, impact, really important, but... Being able to also honor someone's intention is also important too. This person is not trying to hurt me. They are hurting me, and then I can tell them, hey, this is hurting me.
I need you to do this differently. Yeah, I think where that can get a little complicated with people or for people is because you don't get a endless bank account on intent. You don't. No. You have a limited bank account on intent. You are only allowed so many good intentions before we start essentially caring only about it. Yes. Now, for people who have a significant attachment wound. they often polarize one way or the other.
They either give people an endless bank account for intention or they give them no bank account for intention. I give none. Yes. And so, as is always the case, the healthy place is in between these two extremes. You give them some bank account, but you also retain the ability to recognize, look, man, I get that you kind of say that your heart's in the right place, but we've been around on this particular ride two or three times here, and you just don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore.
that's a totally healthy way of being in the world. It's that flexibility again that has been kind of a theme of what we've been talking about here. Do you have the ability to both say yes and say no? Are you stuck in yes or are you stuck in no? Which, you know, I think that can be kind of like a guide. For some people, I know inside myself, I tend to only focus on impact. If someone impacts me in a negative way, my impulse is to be like, you're dead to me. This has happened once or twice, yes.
Kicked off the island. So I've had to really learn to build a capacity inside of myself to, okay, intent. And building a bit of room. It's still very hard for me, especially when I don't like somebody. It's all good. My protection is up. But kind of recognizing.
that are you a person that is just oh well well their intention was this and this like maybe you need to pay attention to the impact self-awareness is a huge part of this and if you're like me Even though some of my parts are like, you have to be able to give the benefit of the doubt. And recognize that this person is not trying to have this impact. And it's up to me to inform them the impact they're having because they probably don't know. Yes. Yeah. And that for me is the big question.
Because we could easily spiral off here into a whole cultural commentary thing. I'm going to avoid doing that for a whole bunch of different reasons. But the whole thing with intent and impact is, to me, more about communication. It's about, hey, when I express to you...
that this went sideways, how do you meet it? Do you meet it with like, well, you know, my intent was. Or do you meet it with, oh, my bad. I'm going to correct my behavior in the future and do my best. And like, yeah, maybe they f*** it up again. But okay, you go through another cycle. Did it improve? Did you get 50% of the way there? If there's not improvement in behavior, then none of this matters. But if you see that kind of upward trajectory with somebody else...
That's what it's all about. And if you're not willing to accept not quite right initially, you're never going to get to that upward trajectory because you're just going to X the person out from the start. And hey...
you need to have more of these positive experiences in order to repair these attachment wounds so if you're immediately crossing off everyone who's not quite quite right you're never going to build one of those relationships that then allows you to do this kind of work so that you just like
exiled everybody from the start of it. Does that make sense? Yeah. And when you're someone like me who's that disorganized, it's important to note you're not doing it for the other person. Yeah. Yeah. You are doing it for yourself. In a way, it's not even about them. It's not about learning how to like someone you don't like. It's not about moving yourself through these painful experiences for the benefit of that person. It's for yourself.
Because no matter what that person's response is, you are repairing that inner trust inside of yourself because you're showing your young ones, I'm the adult now that you should have had when you were little. Like I'm now the person I dreamed of when I was little in my bedroom by myself that would come and like save me. And now I'm doing that work. Yeah. And that sometimes looks like me telling people to f*** right off. Yeah.
And other times it looks like I need a lot of space from you right now because I need to just have that space because a lot's going on and you need to leave me alone. Or sometimes that looks like. I'm about to have a very vulnerable conversation and I don't need problem solving. I just need you to hold space because I'm about to throw up. And I love that we're ending here because.
This is kind of the secret sauce of the whole thing. And it's the answer to the question, how do I do this without having the perfect partner, the perfect relationship, the perfect therapist, the perfect friend? Because the goal here is to become the secure attachment figure yourself. That's the whole point, to think of yourself, to have that model of yourself increasingly as somebody you can trust.
somebody you can rely on, somebody that who you really know can draw those boundaries that you need with other people, can stand up for yourself, somebody who has access to that whole range of emotional experiences. And I got to tell you, a huge first step in the process for people is opening themselves up to the possibility that they could become that person. That doesn't mean you are today. That doesn't mean you will be tomorrow.
but you're retaining the possibility that that could be true for you at some point down the line. And from there, once you get the mental space around that, it's just an idea that you can have in the world. So much becomes possible for a person. Yeah, what I would say is that this is where we get to that piece of the phrase, well, you can't heal in isolation.
you know like you you heal in community because if you're just like in your room you know watching youtube all day long or whatever or you know like taking in content by yourself you're not giving yourself those opportunities to be that person that you need to be. You're not giving a chance to really honor your protective parts when they show up.
to listen to yourself, to go like, okay, I can trust myself. And therefore, because I can trust myself, I can do this. And we learn that by unfortunately being in.
connection with people painful difficult connection with people yeah yeah so this is why this work is so hard and i could not have gotten to where i am if i had not Had people that were really safe and that I could trust like I don't want to like sell this image that You can do it by yourself because I don't think you can You can get pretty far but inevitably there are spaces.
that you will not be able to move beyond until you take the risk of moving into connection with another person. Yeah, and I think that you can do enough on your own most of the time. Not for everyone, but... most of the time for most people, you can do enough on your own to get yourself to a place where you can start to risk those connections with other people and have slightly better results.
than you used to have in the past, which hopefully if we apply these different tools and do these different practices, all of this stuff kind of gets us into a little upward spiral with that. But no, I think you're totally right. I don't think you can make the whole journey on your own. Nope. Oh, I love you so much, babe. It's always so great to have these conversations with you. And I just think you're so fantastic in how you think about it and how you talk about it.
I don't know if I actually said at the beginning of the conversation, Elizabeth is an associate therapist, if you happen not to know. She's working towards her MFT in California. I think that you're you currently maybe have a couple spots for like couples and things like that.
If people want to find you, they can find you on your website, elizabethferrera.com question mark? Elizabeth Ferreira Somatic. There we go. Okay. And I'll also put the links to it in the description of today's episode. I just always love doing this with you, babe. Thanks for doing it. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I love talking with Elizabeth today about how we can work with our attachment wounds. And one of the things that I appreciate most just about her in general.
is her willingness to be so open and vulnerable with people about her own process around these issues. It takes a lot to be able to talk about these incredibly sensitive topics. Because they are so linked to who we are as people and how we feel inside. And it's easy for them to evoke a lot of shame or guilt or other very complex and often quite difficult emotions to deal with.
And there were times during our conversation when Elizabeth even got a little emotional herself. And watching somebody work with those emotions and manage them in different ways and then be able to keep on going. Talking about this very sensitive subject and dispensing all of this fantastic information about it that I know really helps people out, that's very powerful on its own.
And as you probably know, I just think that I have the coolest partner and I feel so blessed to be around here. So anyways, today we started by talking about what it feels like to have a fearful attachment style. and a fearful attachment style is characterized by both closeness and distance feeling bad to a person when i step in it's scary when i step out it's also scary i can't trust myself but i also can't trust you
And this leads to a kind of push and pull in relationships, and it creates an underlying feeling of paralysis for people. They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. And this makes the work very difficult, because there's a kind of paradox. We heal attachment wounds by having new experiences the brain and body can learn from. This means we need new inputs. We need more information. But the only place we can get those inputs is through relationship.
either relating to our interior differently than we have in the past, or relating to other people differently. But those inputs are scary. They're where we were wounded in the first place. So the medicine and the threat are kind of the same thing. which is then complicated by the fact that most people with attachment wounds have learned to relate to others in insecure ways, and this tends to lead to less than ideal outcomes for them.
An interesting reframe when you're trying to get more closeness with another person is viewing them as if they were a kid. Elizabeth talked about this really eloquently. Because most of the time, our attachment wounds come to us from adults. So that's a way that you can kind of connect with your younger parts and see the younger parts in other people, which can make them feel a bit less intimidating. But along the way, we need to listen to our protectors.
the aspects of ourselves that developed different kinds of armoring for good reason. You had painful experiences with other people, and you developed aspects of relating that serve a function. so we want to be thoughtful about the kinds of closeness that we extend to other people because our first priority when we're working with attachment wounds is we don't want to develop more attachment wounds that's the first thing to avoid
So we want to be very thoughtful about the circumstances that we put ourselves into and the people that we surround ourselves with. I then talked with Elizabeth about working with anger and healthy protest, which is an emotion and a form of self-expression that... many people are just not permitted in life in general and particularly when they're young so it's often repressed by us and a big part of elizabeth's practice is helping people get in touch with that feeling of healthy protest
which often includes a recognition of all the experiences that they went through that were simply not appropriate. They shouldn't have had to deal with those things. Other people really should have behaved differently. It was their fault. And that kind of revving up aspect...
that we often push down or push away inside of ourselves can be very powerful and very helpful for people and as she said anger is the truth teller we then talked a bit about our own work inside of our relationship and one of the things i really focused on here
was the bravery it takes to enter into a meaningful friendship or even a romantic relationship as somebody who has a more fearful style. And that's sometimes a piece of things that it's very easy for people to miss. Just like I said at the beginning of the recap,
It is so difficult to be vulnerable in the ways that can ultimately help us when past experiences with vulnerability have just not gone very well. From there, one of the things we talked about was the power of corrective emotional experiences. and different ways of approaching interactions with other people that could potentially lead to more of those experiences. And what that ultimately lets us do, end of the road, is we start developing this view of ourselves.
as a secure attachment figure we start cultivating a kind of belief in ourselves as the sort of person who can deal with difficult situations or solve problems or overcome different challenges somebody who is capable and effective inside of our relationships, and somebody who knows what works for them and what doesn't. Somebody who has the internal flexibility, and that's what a lot of this really comes back to, flexibility, to be able to step in.
and be able to step out with other people as they want to, rather than feeling like that's being dictated to them by their conditioning. Doing this is really difficult. It's not easy. It's hard work. And also, I've seen Elizabeth do it.
i've seen other people do it i've heard stories from her of the people that she's worked with doing it i've talked to friends who have done it this really can be done for people you really can get to a place inside of yourself where you do feel better you do feel more agentic you do feel more flexible and
You know, I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen in her. And, you know, I just really appreciate all of the work that she's done inside of our relationship. I really appreciate her as a person. I'm sure that comes through. And I just think it is so impressive. When somebody who comes from that personal history, who has had those experiences, are able to work with them in ways that allow them to feel more and more free over time. Because that's a hard job to do.
So I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I, of course, had a great time talking with Elizabeth. If you've been liking the podcast and you haven't subscribed yet, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening through a podcast feed, subscribing really helps us out. Also, you can leave a comment, you can leave a rating and a positive review, and you can even find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash beingwellpodcast.
And for the cost of just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return, including transcripts of the episodes and ad-free versions of what we create. Also, just as a quick mention, Elizabeth is currently working with couples. She has a couple of spots available in her practice. They will probably fill up very quickly. But if you're interested in doing this work with her, with somebody else,
Hey, maybe reach out to her through her website. And I've included a link to her website in the description of today's podcast, and you could probably find it pretty easily by just searching her name, Elizabeth Ferreira. Until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.