Sarah, welcome to menopause. Rise and thrive. I am Dr. Sarah pulled me and this podcast is your go to guide for navigating perimenopause and menopause. If you are feeling a little overwhelmed, trust me, you are in great company. Each week, I'll bring you expert advice, raw, honest conversations and simple tips to help you stay grounded and maybe even find some humor in the process. Let's rise, thrive and tackle this wild ride together. Hi everyone. Welcome back to the
show. I am super excited. I've been waiting for this moment like maybe not my whole life, but definitely, since I went on retreat in Panama, I met an amazing woman, Amanda, and she is on the show with us today. I think that everything we talked about on the retreat was so incredibly spicy but valuable, and like just it really hits deep. So I'm really excited. I'm going to let Amanda introduce herself, and then we're just going to chat. And I hope you all enjoy and get some value out
of this. Yeah,
hi. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me. And I mean such kind words. I still struggle with imposter syndrome sometimes, so it's like, oh my gosh, she's talking about me. That's amazing. So thank you. Yeah, we met in Panama, in March, and had just this really beautiful, wonderful connection and with all of these other women, and it was really powerful. So a little bit about myself. I was an educator for 10
years. I taught high school and college, a lot of social studies, mostly psychology, and then I transitioned into therapy, and now I am an attachment therapist and an attachment coach. I work, I do still work with a lot of kids, pre teens through young adults, and then I do a lot of work with women, women and parents. So yeah, it's it's become I feel so grateful to have had this second career. I loved my first career.
I loved teaching, and I just got to a point where I really wanted to have more one on one connection with people and be able to make like more individual, you know, change with others. So, yeah, it's been a really cool journey this whole new life.
Yeah, amazing. Well, what we talked about on the retreat, one of the things that I really wanted to bring to the podcast, and I find fascinating, is, if you look at Tiktok and Instagram, there's so much information out there about attachment styles, and you can really go down a rabbit hole with with this stuff, and perhaps pick apart your romantic
partner. Or maybe this information can scare you from wanting to find another romantic partner if you're single, you brought up such a great concept that I think could really, really hit home for some of the listeners about discovering your attachment style to yourself. So I would love for you to just expand on that, and we'll chat about it for a
bit. Yeah, and I do want to mention too that attachment styles are fluid, and they change over time. You know what attachment style you might have had and your adolescence is not necessarily the same you have in your 40s, and it can change after that, and person to person, it can be different. We can have really secure attachments with certain people in our lives, and anxious ones with others, and avoidant ones with, you know, other people.
So, you know, it's not, I don't ever want anyone to feel pigeonholed by their attachment style, because they took some test, you know, online that told them that they are this thing and that that changes. And it changes from person to person. It changes with age, and you know, whatever you happen to be
going through that moment. But yeah, I love the whole idea that we have an attachment style with our own self, and the more safe and secure that attachment style is, then you're more likely to recognize it in other people, so whether it's a romantic partner or your parents, your children, friends and so all of these people, you can have different attachment styles, but being able to recognize what a safe and secure attachment is with your own self, like your capital S self, will help you, know,
follow you into all of these other different relationships. And so I I do a lot of that work with my clients, especially with women. Like, how do we feel safe and secure? How do we trust our own, our own voice? If we can't trust ourselves, how are we going to go out in the world and trust other
people? It's. Amazing. I love that, and I love the idea of framing it in this idea of attachment style, because I feel like maybe you can start giving us examples of different attachment styles and how they play out within the concept of ourselves. Because again, there's so much content out there flooding us with things about this, this person did this, and this person did
that. So if you could maybe, like, point to an attachment style and just explain it, and then how it shows up for herself, and then maybe some action items for the listeners out there as to, yeah, like, what would help to break free of that cycle? Because it sounds like what you're saying is that you can, because this can change,
oh yeah, it can change throughout your entire life. So I'm gonna use this brilliant analogy that My Brilliant Friend Eli Harwood came up with. She is an attachment guru. She's also known as the attachment nerd, if people follow her on social media. And so I think a really easy way to think about it is she put animals to different attachment styles. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. So when you have a secure attachment, it's almost
like you are a koala. So you can be, like, cuddly and loving and like, it's like, there's a calmness and like, you can be on your own, but you also can be with others. And if you think of like a koala as like, warm and just soft, really safe, that's, that's kind of what we're we're going for, is we want to be koalas, and then we have the
avoidant turtles. And so you know, if you think of a turtle, that if there's any type of danger or fear, whether it's real or imagined, that you're going to hide in your shell, like you're going to go into your own protective abilities and hide in your shell. And so we have the avoidant turtle. We have the insecure honey badger.
And so the honey badger is, like, really intense, and like, always going and, you know, it's, you know, I can't even remember what those videos were way back when about the honey badgers, but they're kind of, you know, all over the place, and they don't stop. And once they decide they want something they like, keep going. And it's like this idea of badgering. And then we have disorganized and
disorganized attachment. Is the dragon that at any moment's notice, it could be, you know, fire breathing, it could just go off, that they're really kind of unpredictable, and that they can be flying, and it can look, you know, beautiful, and then they can, you know, burn down a whole village at the moment, yeah. So I think that's a really easy way to look at it. And there are a lot of other, you know, a lot a lot of other ways to look at it. A lot of, you know, different categories within those
categories. But I think just keeping it simple and remembering, like, I'm feeling a little bit Honey Badger ish right now, or I'm, I'm feeling a little bit like a turtle, and so that instead of, like, getting so caught up in whatever your you know your label is that you've given yourself like, I just want to feel like a koala. I just want to have this like, warm, fuzzy calmness about me.
And I think that's a really good way to kind of look at it, and that we can there are, and I think most of us can look back and go, oh yeah, with that person, yeah, I was a little bit of a honey badger, and there was something about them that triggered whatever past wound or insecurity that I had that, like, brought out this, this particular animal in me, or with other people, it could Be like a turtle, like you really kind of hide from them, and you avoid them, and you avoid whatever it
is that, whatever wound it is that they're triggering you. And so how do we become koalas with ourselves and like that idea of like warm cuddle, like lovingness with our own hearts is, is what I think that we really should be striving for. Because if we are a warm koala with ourselves and with we love ourselves that much and feel that safe, then our partners, our children, our friends, our co workers, they're gonna, they're gonna feed off of that.
Yeah, and instead of triggering their wounds and making them feel like a honey badger, instead of making them feel like a turtle, you know, we also trigger this, like warm, cuddly feeling with them as well.
That's beautiful. And I would assume that if, if we. See, and I'm going to ask you for how do we do that? But let's say we get there, I would assume that with that would come like your spidey senses might pick up on things that don't make you feel good and and you realize that it's about the other, rather than yourself, and you stop questioning your behaviors. Does that make sense? Like, yes, you're just like
you're there. This is me. And if you don't, if you make me feel like you're rubbing me the wrong way, if you make me feel like a turtle, I don't want to feel that way. I'm going to be a koala. Yeah, and if it's a new relationship, where it's consistently making you feel like a turtle. Maybe that's not the relationship for you, or is it something that you need to look at in a different way?
Yeah, I think that's that's exactly, exactly it that like being really curious with yourself, if I know that most of the time I'm a koala, and all of a sudden I'm feeling like a turtle, like, what's going on? What is that person triggering within me? And if I can really trust myself and hear myself and I know my own voice, then I'm going to be able to say, like, Okay, what is it?
What's happening here? Why am I all of a sudden getting Honey Badger vibes of myself and being really curious and knowing how to recognize and knowing what to do with that, I think is incredibly valuable. I also have this theory that, you know, and I can only speak from my experience as a woman, but as a woman, we're taught from a really young age not to trust ourselves. You know, we're told, and I and boys are told this too, but we're told, you know you're okay, and don't worry
about it. You're fine. And as a child, when you hear like, oh, I guess I mean, I'm upset and I'm hurting, but I was told that I'm okay, so I guess what I feel must be wrong, and we start to distrust our own voice and our own feelings from an incredibly young age, like stop crying. You don't have to feel that way. You're fine, you're okay. And so then, as we get older, we we stop recognizing what those emotions are, because we were told like, Oh, I am feeling
hurt, but I guess I'm okay. And so I think one of the really great things that we can do as you know, adults, as we get older, is it's hard to recognize that in ourself. So finding a therapist, finding a coach, finding someone who is really skilled in this. There are some wonderful books, but really getting that second opinion because we don't know what we
don't know. Yeah, and having someone on the outside help us hear our voice again and start to question the really negative voices that we have in our heads, you know, like, who's Whose voice is that? Is that my mother's voice? Is that this protective voice, you know? And we're kind of bleeding into internal family systems and parts work here, but it's all
very attachment based. So, yeah, I think that one of the first steps is learning to really just learning to hear our voice again, and then you can start learning to trust ourselves, because nobody knows you like you do. Yeah, getting back to that, like gut internal feeling and knowing that you have the best intentions for yourself. You're like true capital S self is only caring and connected and compassionate, and how do we get back to that voice and hear it and trust it so that we can
recognize it in other people? So I think that's kind of the first step,
yeah, but it sounds like a really hard step for for the majority of people, right? There's so many messages coming at us that reinforce what we may have been taught in childhood, or most of us have been taught in childhood. So, you know, coming through the previous messaging only to be dropped into a bucket. I mean, we have so much messaging around us right now, so it's kind of hard to like, you know, quiet that noise. So finding a therapist that's skilled reading
books. Is there anything else that you would point to?
I mean, I would specifically look at so again, my friend Eli Harwood wrote of wonderful book. This is her journal, securely attached. This is a great place to start. But there are some really other, you know, brilliant books out there on attachment that can help you recognize that if you are in a position to get a therapist or to get an attachment coach, you know, it's not an option for everybody, but there is work that you can do and even just starting to question the negative voices.
Negative self talk, and really starting to recognize that, like, Whoa, that was that was incredibly cruel. What I just said to myself, like, where did I learn that?
Yeah, right. Where did that come from? Yeah, sometimes it's an opportunity to do that in midlife. Like, I find that this is the time where we start to question all that negative self talk, and we're just like, What is this? That is some kind of bullshit. Like, why did I even have that thought?
Yeah? And a lot of times the things we say to ourself we would never say to another person, never Yeah. We are. We can be our own worst critic. And so really starting to question, where did that voice come from? Did I learn it from my mother, which is possible, a father, a sibling, a friend, you know, TV, just where did I hear that voice? Because that is not You were not born with that voice. That is not your capital as self. If any voice is cruel or negative or hurtful, it is not your true
self. And so starting to really, like, almost wade through all of these really negative self talk aspects of ourselves and start to just be curious. I think that's like, let's just be curious. I'm going to be curious
with myself. And you know, not everybody also has the option to go to Panama and go on a yoga and meditation retreat, but there's something about taking a few moments of of quiet, even in your own home, which can be so hard you can even just like going into the bathroom if you have a hard decision to make or you're not sure, you know, maybe, I think a really good
example is dating. So if you're single in midlife, and you're dating which has all of its own, you know, different, wonderful and terrible facets, but it can be really scary. And if you're if you're in your midlife and you are dating, you probably have some wounds from past relationships, and there's this fear of, how do I make sure I don't do it again? Yeah, yeah.
And so I think, like, if you can tap into that voice a lot of times, when we look back on past relationships that didn't work out, we can pinpoint times and go, Oh, I knew. Yeah, yeah, I knew, and I was, I was kind of trying to tell myself, but it's so easy to not listen, and it's so easy to make excuses, because a lot of times we're surviving, or we're really trying
or but we they're just good in bed.
Totally. There's some good reasons. Yes, good sex can make you overlook so many other terrible qualities, and sometimes true also, Sarah, sometimes you can just have good sex, and that's that can be it, and be really honest with yourself, yeah, so just being honest, listening to your own voice, and we usually know when they're not right for us. So, like, just taking some time, like, what do I really know? Like, what am I really truly feeling about this person? What's my like, gut telling
me, right? Do I feel like a koala when I leave each date?
Right? Yes. Do I feel safe, right? Does my capital S self feel safe with this person and with myself? Or is there like, am I getting a little honey badgery, and what is that? What is it about that person that's bringing that out in me? And be really curious, what is that old wound that that person is triggering. Is this something I can work on, or is this something that I don't want to deal with, and just trusting our own selves right,
and knowing that you know, even if you make a wrong call, because sometimes people bring their representatives to the table, and you know, things can really, you know, we could have a true narcissist coming at us, and you know, they can really play, play the role well, right? They can charm the pants off of you, and knowing that regardless if you're trusting yourself, you're going to be okay. No matter what was thrown at you. You're going to be just fine with this person
without this person. You know, there might be some discomfort along the way, but there always is discomfort in life. We're never going to avoid discomfort. That's not the, you know, the goal of this game, right?
So, yeah, I could see that like it's hard because.
Get wrapped up in the excitement of a new relationship, but then if you take a moment to pause, you know it's funny. I had some patient of mine about a month ago. She was on the acupuncture table, and I walked in, I pulled the needles. I'm like, Well, how are you feeling? She's like, well, I've decided I'm going to break up with my boyfriend. So I was like, Maybe you just needed 45 minutes on the table with your energy flowing freely to finally decide that you know,
yes, like and quiet, not being able to you can't text on the acupuncture table. You can't, like, do any work. It's just there's silence. And so just looking at your own self, yeah, that's beautiful. Good for her.
Yeah, 100% it was thought that any he wasn't a bad guy, you know, there was it just it didn't soothe her nervous system to be with him anymore. It came, you know, too hard. So I love the idea of saying to, you know, I I left the evening feeling like a koala. That's like the end goal, right? Like I feel warm and fuzzy inside. I'm not feeling insecure, I'm not feeling, you know, avoidant. I'm not feeling all those ugly
feelings. I'm feeling good, you know, so flipping from dating to being in a relationship in midlife, because a lot of women decide to leave their husbands in midlife, right? Divorce is much more prevalent because women have choices. Now, that's not new. Yes, we do. Most listeners on the podcast know it's because we actually earn our own money, or we realize there's choices. You know, there's many reasons, but women know they can leave if they're not happy in a lot of
circumstances. So women leave their husbands during midlife because they start to become more reflective and what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. Can you give women that are having a rocky time in their relationship some some guidance so they're working on being more secure within themselves, and they feel pretty good about that, but they still are getting these yucky feelings from their partner. It sounds like attachment styles can
change. So do we want to dismiss the dismissive just because they're dismissive, or do you think that with the proper help, that a dismissive, avoidant husband, for example, could potentially, if they choose, and if they put the work in, could they potentially change their attachment style?
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of it is going back and healing your past wounds. And so are you willing to, like, dig in? And, I mean, you just said it like it's not about being comfortable. Change happens in the discomfort. So are you willing to be really uncomfortable and go through that change and, like, find out where those wounds are coming from, because you learned those wounds at some point, you experienced things, maybe many things. And so are you willing to put in the work and and
really learn how to do that. And so I really believe that there is individual work that needs to be done in that sense, and then there's couples work that can be done, but it is kind of a two fold process. It's, it's really hard, you know, couples therapy, couples attachment work can be incredible. And there's a lot of individual work that has to happen too, and how willing,
how willing each participant is. And I found it interesting because I've watched some friends and some patients go through these types of scenarios, and sometimes the people that think they're willing in the relationship aren't actually the willing ones,
because they just want the other person to change,
right, right? And I, you know, I think that that's certainly an easy trap for us to fall into. Because, you know, if we've gone through our own therapist and done our own work, you know, we've healed a lot of wounds, and we should, you know, get credit for that, right? We definitely have grown as a person, but that one wound might be just sticking around, and that's where it's playing out, is in the relationship, and you might not be willing to give it up for whatever reason, yeah,
and it's because it's hard to give those up. That change is tough, it's uncomfortable, and we're getting new wounds all the time. So maybe you did a ton of work in your 20s, and now in your 40s, you have new wounds. And yeah, or your old wounds might be presenting in a new way that you didn't realize. You know whether it's after children or it's after your first marriage ended or an illness, and so it is, it's, it's a constant work. It is, you know, if you want to keep that koala like state like
it does take work. It's not just gonna happen, yeah,
for sure. Well, any other words of wisdom for finding your inner Koala? Koala? Steady there tonight.
I know, right? They just like, make you feel good. They seem just like warm and loving and soft. And I just, I really believe in the work of learning to listen and trust ourself. You know, if you do have the the wonderful privilege of being able to afford an attachment or internal family system therapist or a coach. I work for an attachment coaching company, so we're called attachment labs, so and we have wonderful practitioners, and we can work with anyone, anywhere in the country or in
the world. I have international clients too. So if you do have that option, it can be really helpful. And coaching work is kind of cool because it can be very short term, and you can have, like, a really specific presenting problem and just work through that, and then it doesn't have to be this, like ongoing therapeutic relationship. And so that's, yeah, I would really encourage people, if they have that option, and if not, just start listening to your voice, yeah, and questioning, like, Who is
that voice? And it really opens up like such a new world of your own intuition and intentional living. That's beautiful. And it's never too late. That's the other thing. It's never, it doesn't matter how old you are, how young you are. It's never, ever too late to do this work.
So with the attachment lab, you have a lot of clinicians. It sounds like it, does it feel like it's coaching more than therapy? Does it feel and look like a session that that a therapy session would look like, as far as like length of time is? It usually an hour? A half hour? What? What is the process to onboard?
Yeah, so you fill out a survey on our website, and it's the actual sessions are an hour, and depending on who you use, will change. You know, how much your hourly rate is. It can feel a little bit like therapy at times, but it can be a lot more solutions based. So you're coming in with my biggest difference, yeah, that it can be really solution space, like, here's my thing. This is what I want to work on. I've got, I just bought a four pack. So we've got four sessions to, you
know, get some tools. And what are some tools to work with this? Like, really specific presenting problem, that is one option. You know, some people do come back, like therapy, and they are really consistent. And so it just kind of depends what it is that you meet and who you want to work with and what you want to work on.
I love that. Well, Amanda, I'm going to make sure that you actually email me the links so that
people I will I know
one and you're like friends. It's different when you invite them on the podcast, versus someone that you just know professionally, because they send you everything. And more like, I get bios, I get pictures. I get pictures of, like, five pictures. I'm like, I only need one. But you know, when it's someone that you're inviting on, that you know as a friend, it's different. But I still need your bio, and I
will send you all of my things, I promise.
Well, it's been great having you on the show, I am going to get a koala teddy bear cuddle that. I love that, and I love animals, so that's a great visual for me. And I hope that some of our guests contact your organization, because there seems to be so much value in what you do. Yeah, there. There really is
so thank you so much, Sarah, it was wonderful to see your face. I miss you, and I'm honored to have shared this space with you.
Yeah, it was great. Thank you, Amanda, so much. Yeah, and I will see you next week. You