Latest / The Dr. Psych Mom Show with clinical psychologist Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten / Can You Change Your Attachment Style?

Transcript

Can You Change Your Attachment Style? · The Dr. Psych Mom Show with clinical psychologist Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten

• 0:05
  Hi everybody, and welcome to the doctor.
• 0:07
  Psych mom show today. What we're going to talk about
• 0:10
  is whether you can change your attachment style.
• 0:13
  So your attachment style, I've gone into depth about I've gone
• 0:19
  in depth on what that is in various podcasts.
• 0:22
  You should refer back to the Wong that's on attachment style
• 0:25
  to understand what they are. And basically they're secure and
• 0:29
  insecure, there's two types of insecure.
• 0:32
  So what we're talking about is can you change?
• 0:34
  Well, I mean, I guess, I was thinking about, can you change
• 0:37
  from insecure to secure? Which was what I was asked in my
• 0:40
  Facebook group, but also can you change from secure to insecure?
• 0:44
  And I'll discuss that as well. So, before I get into it, I must
• 0:49
  tell you to subscribe as usual. I have a lot of one's on, you
• 0:54
  know, remember female arousal, female, hypo sexual disorder.
• 0:58
  I have the all of the ones about relationships and attachment and
• 1:03
  women and, you know, Oral sex on women.
• 1:06
  You know, I was going to get there eventually.
• 1:07
  That's the one everybody cares about anyway, so I have lots of
• 1:10
  those and the most recent was on mr.
• 1:13
  And mrs. Just not feeling it or the
• 1:15
  divorced in spirit. One of my couples you meet in
• 1:18
  counseling, AKA a Loveless marriage.
• 1:21
  And I talked about that in depth and I'm going to go through all
• 1:23
  those couples in counseling, eventually, so far, I've done
• 1:26
  four of them. I've done three in order and
• 1:28
  then I did the lean and wife and the CEO.
• 1:32
  Sorry, and the underachieving husband, Anyway, so subscribe if
• 1:37
  you didn't, and please sign up for my Facebook group to,
• 1:39
  because you got a lot of interaction with me in there.
• 1:42
  And of course, follow me on Tick, Tock YouTube, Instagram,
• 1:45
  Facebook everywhere. Okay.
• 1:47
  So what is, what is the point of therapy?
• 1:56
  So, if you're in therapy, what is the overarching point?
• 1:58
  I mean, some people have like a dog phobia or something like
• 2:01
  that and I can be cured. Some people struggle with
• 2:03
  generalized anxiety but The people that come in because
• 2:06
  their relationships are unsatisfying.
• 2:07
  It's really that. You're trying to transform your
• 2:10
  attachment style, you're insecure, and you're trying to
• 2:13
  change it into secure. So that instead of somebody who
• 2:17
  is either pushing people away, or glomming onto them too
• 2:20
  closely, that pushes them away. You are somebody who secure
• 2:23
  within yourself and can give and receive love freely.
• 2:26
  And to be in an interdependent relationship, not a codependent
• 2:30
  relationship where you feel like you're going to die if you're
• 2:32
  not together but an or dependent relationship where you are, fine
• 2:37
  needing things from somebody and being needed.
• 2:41
  If this is very, very hard to do.
• 2:43
  If you were raised in a home where you didn't see a securely,
• 2:45
  attached relationship between your parents and it's hard.
• 2:49
  If you experienced any childhood trauma, or you're an adult child
• 2:52
  of a dysfunctional family, and you were taught and Myriad ways
• 2:56
  that people cannot be trusted. And sometimes people learn
• 3:01
  people cannot be trusted. So I'm going to be super
• 3:03
  independent and not need any And sometimes people learn people
• 3:07
  can't be trusted. So therefore you got to watch
• 3:09
  them all the time like a hawk to make sure they don't leave you
• 3:12
  and if you work on yourself in therapy frequently, the entire
• 3:19
  goal which is not stated if people don't talk openly in
• 3:23
  therapy about attachment. But but another way to
• 3:25
  conceptualize the goal of long-term inside oriented
• 3:28
  Psychotherapy, is, you are trying to grow more securely
• 3:32
  attached, you know, and if you are single Google, you are
• 3:35
  trying to grow more securely attached as well because there's
• 3:38
  always some people in your life like your kids and you know
• 3:42
  maybe your friends and whoever you may date in future, you want
• 3:46
  to be a good loving trustworthy caring person.
• 3:52
  You don't want to be somebody who either shoves people away or
• 3:55
  who wants to merge with them. So, completely that, they feel
• 3:59
  smothered. So how does this happen?
• 4:02
  Well, one thing that I certainly, About myself is the
• 4:06
  therapeutic relationship. So if you have a strong
• 4:09
  Therapeutic Alliance which just means a bond with your
• 4:12
  therapist, then you can actually learn from this relationship
• 4:16
  kind of a little bit. What it's like to be in a
• 4:18
  healthy relationship, you know? And this is why a lot of guys
• 4:21
  pick a female therapist either consciously or subconsciously as
• 4:24
  they're trying to get better at talking to an understanding
• 4:27
  women, and I'll tell you, you know, like if you're a man who
• 4:29
  never talked about like intimacy or emotions or anything like
• 4:34
  that before, Or and you spent every week talking to me about
• 4:36
  it, for 45 minutes, I'll tell you you get better, you know,
• 4:40
  you get better at it, you learn to trust women more.
• 4:42
  I'm there for you at cetera and I'm like a normal human, not
• 4:47
  like some guys, put women on pedestals or else hate women.
• 4:50
  You know you learn to kind of have a respectful caring
• 4:54
  relationship with somebody. It's not completely
• 4:56
  bi-directional, obviously in therapy but it is this is what
• 5:00
  transference is and I mentioned this a lot in the podcast where
• 5:03
  you start to act, With the person, like how you act in
• 5:06
  general, which means that like if you're somebody who pushes
• 5:10
  people away then you'll try to push away the therapist do.
• 5:13
  But over time, you know, the therapist can get closer to you
• 5:17
  than probably anybody can and then you learn that.
• 5:19
  It's okay. And in fact it's good and in
• 5:21
  fact look at how you feel better when you confide more and when
• 5:26
  the conversations go deeper and that this person doesn't
• 5:29
  actually laugh at you or mock you instead, they like empathize
• 5:33
  with you and they get you and and they they find you to be
• 5:36
  valuable and worthwhile and in an interesting you know that can
• 5:40
  be very transformative in and of itself for people with deep
• 5:43
  childhood trauma which is a majority of people who are
• 5:46
  insecurely attached. And again trauma doesn't have to
• 5:49
  be being locked in the closet or beaten, it can be not getting
• 5:52
  your needs met and read the book Running on Empty for more on
• 5:55
  emotional neglect. So, so therapy therapy is a good
• 5:59
  way to work on growing. More securely attached and to
• 6:02
  almost have this practice space on how Interact and more
• 6:06
  reciprocal healthy way with a person.
• 6:09
  What else I always talk about re parenting with an intimate
• 6:12
  relationship. You can be re parented if your
• 6:15
  partner loves you and is committed to you, then you can
• 6:18
  learn how to be over time in a trusting, loving relationship.
• 6:22
  Of course, the key problem here, is that if you're insecurely
• 6:25
  attached, you're probably picked somebody who's insecurely
• 6:28
  attached. I mean almost definitely
• 6:30
  avoided. Picks, preoccupied, preoccupied,
• 6:32
  picks avoidant. I've Talked about this, then
• 6:35
  there's the disorganized attachment style and, you know,
• 6:38
  they can pick each other or they could pick some somebody who is
• 6:41
  preoccupied or avoidant. Again, if you don't know these
• 6:44
  terms, you got to go back to my attachment style podcast, but if
• 6:48
  you find somebody, for example, that you're always pursuing them
• 6:50
  and they're always distancing, it can be hard to feel, reparent
• 6:53
  it in a positive way. So that's where couples
• 6:56
  counseling comes in. It can help you both to grow
• 6:59
  more securely attached with each other by having difficult
• 7:02
  conversations that are about it. Deeper topics and more objective
• 7:07
  conversations than you usually have so you could learn to kind
• 7:11
  of tell each other. What's going on subconsciously?
• 7:14
  And to give one another roadmaps to understanding your inner
• 7:18
  world so that you grow more recognizable and sympathetic to
• 7:23
  one another. And this is what couples
• 7:25
  counseling can help with. Now you say all right fine plug
• 7:28
  for therapy here plug for therapy there.
• 7:30
  Well I mean I'm a therapist so I'm always going to say
• 7:33
  therapies useful But are there any other ways to grow more
• 7:37
  securely attached? Well, on a positive note of
• 7:41
  things that transpire in the world, when you were a little
• 7:43
  child that gets adopted into a healthy family, after you were
• 7:48
  taken out because of abuse or neglect.
• 7:50
  And I worked with children like this many years ago.
• 7:52
  If you're adopted into a loving family and they show you that,
• 7:56
  you know, you can count on them and things are safe and secure
• 7:59
  and your parents knew your new parents love you.
• 8:01
  Yeah, you can grow more securely attached, you really can.
• 8:05
  And this can also happen, even if you have like like sometimes
• 8:09
  people grow into, like they love their in-laws, the way that they
• 8:14
  should have loved their family, if their family would have been,
• 8:16
  you know, healthy and so, like a person who like, at a young age,
• 8:22
  let's say, girl is dating a guy and his parents are very loving,
• 8:25
  you know, or even a best friend and her parents are very loving.
• 8:28
  You can get that almost a tree parenting experience from these
• 8:31
  surrogate parents and that can transform your attachment Style.
• 8:34
  In some way, basically, the thing that transforms your
• 8:36
  attachment style is learning that you can be confident in the
• 8:40
  fact that somebody's going to love you and have your best
• 8:43
  interest at heart. And this can happen through
• 8:47
  long-term relationships when you are working on the relationship
• 8:49
  and increasingly trying to be there for one another, in
• 8:53
  different ways, it can happen by finding a parent figure that can
• 8:57
  do this repair and thing, it can happen via therapy.
• 9:01
  And so these are all the various ways that people can learn Going
• 9:05
  to be more secure in their place in the world and to shed these
• 9:09
  dysfunctional coping mechanisms, which really are boiled down to
• 9:13
  either pushing people away or pulling them into clothes.
• 9:17
  And this can happen. If I did not think that an
• 9:20
  attachment style could be changed, then I would be in the
• 9:23
  wrong business and I've seen it happen.
• 9:25
  But the other question was, is this like being an alcoholic
• 9:29
  where you always have to be on the lookout for reverting to the
• 9:32
  old patterns? Yeah, definitely I mean with
• 9:36
  caveats, right? I mean, a 50 year old woman, who
• 9:39
  has been married for 30 years is not an end, if it's mostly a
• 9:45
  healthy marriage, it doesn't matter if she had a traumatic
• 9:48
  childhood because she's going to Be very different now and she's
• 9:54
  going to have healed a great deal.
• 9:57
  I'm not saying it doesn't matter, it always certainly
• 9:59
  matter she has certain triggers but hers attachment style to her
• 10:03
  husband may be secure, she trusts him, she loves him and
• 10:07
  she no longer conflates him too much with her parents.
• 10:10
  But I bet in the first year of the marriage it was pretty
• 10:13
  Rocky. And there's a lot of people with
• 10:15
  long-term marriages that say that the beginning tendency, you
• 10:18
  know, was to fight and to be volatile.
• 10:21
  And all of these things and over time, they grew together.
• 10:24
  So this definitely happens. And what that means is not only
• 10:26
  do your hormones change so that you don't feel like throwing
• 10:29
  fucking plates at the wall anymore.
• 10:31
  I mean, this is a real thing that, you know, when people are
• 10:34
  young closer, you are to teenage years, where your hormones are
• 10:38
  all over. The place your young 20s brains,
• 10:40
  don't even stop developing till like 26.
• 10:42
  So the way that people act when they're young 20s is like crazy,
• 10:46
  you know, sometimes they have like no impulse control, so that
• 10:49
  coupled with grow up in a different Difficult home will
• 10:52
  make, you have these jealous fits and you have these crazy
• 10:55
  fights, and you're crying, and all this stuff.
• 10:57
  And then many years later, people don't even barely
• 11:00
  recognize what they were. Like, when they were young and
• 11:03
  they had this insecure attachment, they've worked on it
• 11:06
  over time and also physiologically they've changed
• 11:08
  a great deal. So that's certainly does happen.
• 11:11
  But yes, the person who tended toward preoccupied jealous of
• 11:16
  volatility will always kind of if they are triggered in some
• 11:20
  way they met. Always react on the end of the
• 11:22
  spectrum of more preoccupied. And the avoidant person under
• 11:26
  stress will kind of withdraw and kind of push away from people.
• 11:32
  But you have to kind of be aware, but you really can get
• 11:36
  over and get through things and change on a deep level.
• 11:40
  This is true. I talk about this.
• 11:41
  A lot with anxiety. People can cure their anxiety.
• 11:44
  They really can. They can cure OCD.
• 11:46
  They can cure anxiety, even borderline personality, which
• 11:50
  was always thought too. Not to be amenable to change.
• 11:53
  DBT is very helpful with that, really.
• 11:58
  I mean, I decided talked about some other podcast, I feel like
• 12:00
  narcissistic personality disorder is.
• 12:02
  Now the one that said you can't change that.
• 12:04
  That doesn't make any sense. We saw that you could change the
• 12:06
  BPD. So why can't you change?
• 12:08
  NPD, doesn't make any sense. I'm sure that there are studies
• 12:11
  even happening right now, that'll show the same types of
• 12:13
  stuff that the same type of changes amenable.
• 12:16
  And in my practice, I see people with narcissistic traits and the
• 12:19
  full and PG diagnosis. Grow and change as well because
• 12:22
  they're people too. And any person that gets the
• 12:26
  kind of respectful helpful. Therapeutic attention is going
• 12:34
  to in some way evolve and mature.
• 12:36
  I mean, I've never really seen that, there's no impact unless
• 12:40
  you really with the wrong therapist or you're not ready to
• 12:43
  try to change but people who are motivated to change to improve
• 12:47
  their interpersonal issues that are in therapy.
• 12:51
  Or honestly if they are just doing like a shitload of
• 12:54
  introspection and reading and thinking and and trying
• 12:57
  sometimes they can approximate it themselves, you know, but you
• 13:00
  could expedite it. Of course, if you have an
• 13:01
  objective therapist working with you, but anyway.
• 13:04
  Yeah, change is possible. I would really deeply be in the
• 13:08
  wrong field if I didn't believe that and I've seen it happen,
• 13:11
  PTSD can be treated anxiety, depression, certainly, there are
• 13:16
  biological components of things such as the biological
• 13:20
  correlative. Depression, the ones that I
• 13:23
  talked about the fatigue and the fizzy, the physical sorts of
• 13:26
  things, eating more sleeping more, you know, things like
• 13:28
  that. Those don't really therapy, does
• 13:31
  not address the sort of biological things, just like it
• 13:35
  can't really address ADHD. Your brain is just wired
• 13:37
  differently but it can help with negative self-talk, it can help
• 13:41
  with suicidal thoughts. You know of I'm So worthless and
• 13:45
  I wanted I can help with that stuff and with ADHD it can help
• 13:49
  with I'm such a loser. Why can't I Ever get my shit
• 13:52
  together. It can make somebody want to for
• 13:55
  example, get themselves on to a routine you know which then
• 13:58
  would be helpful you know because they start to think of
• 14:01
  themselves as more of a worthwhile person that has a
• 14:04
  possibility of improving and and and growing and changing in a
• 14:09
  positive way. So yes, I do think therapy can
• 14:12
  be very transformative and I do think that attachment style can
• 14:15
  change and people have large large impact on one another.
• 14:19
  And if you are in Healthy and loving relationship that can
• 14:23
  often be transformative. It's not going to be
• 14:26
  transformative without your help and it isn't exactly like the
• 14:30
  situation where a little child, who sadly got abused has now
• 14:34
  adopted by a loving couple. And then that child doesn't
• 14:37
  really do much of anything on their end to be different.
• 14:40
  Just the parents love will be transformative for them in an
• 14:44
  adult relationship. You certainly do have to try on
• 14:47
  purpose to act in different ways but when you do that and then
• 14:50
  the your partner responds differently and you see that
• 14:54
  it's possible to have healthy interactions, then that can be a
• 14:58
  very transformational idea and and can and can then start this
• 15:03
  virtuous cycle where you learn that, if you act different than
• 15:06
  people are nicer and then you start being nicer back and
• 15:09
  they're not nicer and everybody's being nice and and
• 15:13
  loving and respectful and then the relationship transforms
• 15:16
  itself into a more securely attached one.
• 15:19
  Alright? So I hope this was useful.
• 15:21
  Hopefully it address the question and just underscore it.
• 15:24
  I do think people could change their attachment style.
• 15:27
  I have seen it happen and I will talk to you soon.
• 15:29
  Bye.