Stress, Trauma and Emotional Attunement Webinar

I love em 20:18 My name is Jennifer Celli. I am one of the therapists at Evoke, and it's really good to be with you on this platform. Tonight, we are going to be talking about stress, trauma, and emotional attunements. So there are some recommended webinars. Okay, so I'll take questions at the end and feel free to be popping them in as I talk, and then we can discuss them at the end. Okay.

So what is trauma? Trauma is often thought of as what we would call “big T” trauma, or like a single-time, single-event trauma, like being in a war or being in a car accident and/or some kind of abuse. And I want to kind of expand that definition tonight, talk about how stress and trauma impact our attachment system, and I’ll be explaining what that is; how your attachment system impacts your child’s attachment system and, therefore, their adult relationships; and then what we can do to work on and heal that attachment relationship or that attachment style, both in yourself and in your child’s.

So trauma is any overwhelming experience that the brain has trouble processing or integrating. So what happens in trauma is there’s a lack of integration between both hemispheres of the brain, and sometimes with especially like a major life event trauma, there can be a sort of “kabobulation,” and for lack of a better word, or a lack of integration between what happened. So when we think about something that happened that was big or really stressful and happened really quickly—within example being, let’s say, an Iraq war veteran who was near a bomb when it was detonated—they will tend to not be able to process that trauma or that event quickly enough because it happened so fast. That’s an example of an alarming experience. Another example of an overwhelming experience can be something like—and we’re going to talk more about these—smaller but more pervasive lifelong traumas, whether relationally with other people or in the family system. And I’m going to be talking about how traumas impact the nervous system. I’m going to go into them briefly, but that’s a whole other topic. And so we want to remember that trauma is in the nervous system, not in the events. So if we can work with the brain and the body—meaning the nervous system, the electrical current in the body—then we can start to heal the way that the trauma is showing up in the body.

Okay, so an example of a “big T” trauma—another example—is something like natural disasters, the death of a loved one, severe childhood emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, neglect, betrayal, abandonment, a parent’s divorce, experiencing or witnessing violence in the house, rape, armed robbery. Right, we can go on and on. But some of them might be less obvious as a “big T,” what we call “big T” trauma, or these single-event traumas. Could be things like being immobilized, any prenatal stress, rejection, birth stress, both for the mother or the infant, the illness of a parent, sibling, grandparent. Okay.

And then “little t” trauma. These are things that, over time, are series of seemingly minor mishaps that accumulate and can be as damaging as a single major catastrophe. So some of these less obvious cases of trauma can include minor car accidents, falls, minor injuries, medical or dental procedures, especially when involving anesthesia, pelvic examinations, being left alone, waiting to be picked up from school, being lost in a strange place, feeling unloved or criticized or unsupported or unrecognized—the big one—a parent who drinks or rages or withdraws emotionally and gambles, a parent who is sick, anxious, or depressed. We’re going to be talking more about those nervous system states in a parent and how that impacts the child; a parent who often comes late or breaks promises, financial difficulties in the family, moving house, changing schools, the birth of a sibling, having a sibling who’s more intelligent or gifted or beautiful, a popular sibling, food poisoning, even death of pets, not being picked for the team, not being invited to a party, being teased or bullied by their peers, unfair harsh punishment, hurtful comments by a teacher or parent, or being rejected by a friend or romantic partner.

So—we want to remember, too—that trauma is subjective to the individual. So what may not feel traumatic to one person could be to another. So an example of this was when I actually—I played soccer in high school, and I felt very passionate about it, and I didn’t make the team my senior year. I didn’t make the varsity team after playing JV for three years, and my mom—I remember being pretty distraught—and my mom had lost her dad in Vietnam. He was shot down and was M.I.A. in Vietnam and never came home. So I—so we’re looking at her “big T” trauma. I had a big single-event trauma, and then my more pervasive—it kept happening—this rejection, this being let down, and—and something that she said to me that felt really traumatic for me—it was actually almost worse than not making the team—was her saying, “Well, your dad didn’t die, so get over it.” So we have to remember that sometimes the reactions that we have towards our children are towards other people can feel like—I remember exactly where I was standing when she said it. I have a very visceral somatic response. And—and if you’re already kind of nervous about the things that I would be presenting tonight, I just want to remind you to go back and listen to our podcast episode of the webinar on cause-and-effect parenting and how that is a thinking error.

So I just kind of want to preface this as well, with all of these things about trauma and attachment are true based on research, and that being said, it’s up to your child to take their lives into their own hands and to heal themselves as well.

Okay, so what is the attachment system? The attachment system is an inborn system that causes the child to attach to their caregiver for survival, and through this process their brains are shaped. So when they’re—they are born, they have billions of neurons that have been unshaped. It’s kind of like they have all these excess brain cells that need direction. And the way that their brains are organized and the way that that synaptic pruning, or the way those nerve—those brain cells get trimmed so that their brain is organized and makes sense and is coherent so they can function, is based on their relationship with their caregiver, and this is through the attachment system. So the parent’s brain is directly impacting the child’s brain through their relational interactions from when they’re born and probably before they’re born all the way through childhood and into adulthood. And then other—they will have other attachment figures, like partners, romantic partners, best friends, eventually, there’s spouses that will eventually replace you as their attachment figure or their main attachment figure. They don’t—they never replace a parent, but they—they will kind of come in as their—that person’s main attachment figure, okay, as an adult. So that’s the—the allure—that kind of the more common pathway, attachment, and how that happens as adults. And so this is again the relationship of the child to the caregiver over time, and the attachment shapes not only the developing mind but also the self-regulatory circuits in the brain. Okay.

So—and we’re going to get more into this—but if, for instance, the parent is highly anxious or stressed, then that child—the child’s going to pick up on that through the use of mirror neurons in their brain, which are kind of like little eyes that pick up on somebody else’s mirror neurons. Okay, they’re really oversimplifying that, and they will connect and—and be shaping one another. And so if that—the parent is anxious, the child picks up on that implicitly and somatically and through different parts of their brain, and they start to wire towards anxiety as law, or security and safety and moving through the world in a comfortable, healthy way. Okay.

So this work comes out of the—the work of the psychologist named Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s. She did an experiment called “the strange situation,” and the strange situation has been replicated in cultures all over the world. So it’s not just a cultural phenomenon. Attachment happens in the brain; it’s an innate necessity for the brain of the child to form and be able to—to be able to connect with others in a healthy way. And so in the strange situation, they found that if they put a child—they would bring a child and their primary caregiver into the lab, and they would observe them for a while together, and then a—would have the caregiver leave, and in that separation—again, these are infants or babies around a year, 15 months—they—they gauge different—they’ve worked with different ages of children of intense—and the—what they figured was that if the caregiver left, that would trigger or turn on the attachment system in the child, and they would be able to see if there were different styles of attachment. Okay.

So we’re going to go over some of that study and how that impacts us in our work at Evoke and how it can impact you and your relationship with your child. So secure—there’s four types of attachment. There’s first a secure attachment. This is only about 25% of the population. Secure attachment would look like, in the strange situation, that the child—once the caregiver would return—they would be soothed by the caregiver’s return. They might be upset; they might cry; they might have separation anxiety; and then they would—be able to take in the parent and their ability to help the child self-regulate again. So they—they were attuned enough to help the child regulate their nervous systems, so from crying to calm, right. And usually parents that are securely attached have positive intentions of love, care, and concern. So it’s not so much about what we say but the energy in which—or the—the intention, the—what we’re holding in our mind about our child, right? So the child will pick up on those intentions, and even if you make a mistake, it’s okay, because they would be able to feel the intention of care and love and support. Okay. And so this—this first concept is really important in your work with—with us at Evoke and going forward with each—I’ll—the idea is that repairing the rupture—I’m going to explain what that is—repairing ruptures is essential, and it’s more important than the rupture itself. So in this strange situation, the rupture would have been the parent left; the child is upset; that’s the rupture. The repair is the parent coming back, soothing the child. With older children or teenagers or young adults, this could look like a whole host of things. The rupture is the thing that was painful and/or the mistake maybe that we made or the child made. And—again, the important part here to remember is learning how to repair those ruptures and be able to hear one another, and that’s where the “I feel” statement comes in, feedback, the assignments that we give when you do a parent visit, things like that that we’re—we’re talking about resentment and requests and other—other forms of desiring a new level of behavior and wanting new things for one another and being able to forgive and eventually and hear one another in what was painful. Okay. And I think it’s important to remember as well that it’s possible to be human and still be full of love. Okay. So we can—meaning that we can be imperfect and still be full of love, and that’s okay, right? This idea of perfect parenting is a myth. So we can just let ourselves off the hook and—and remember that adequate parenting, good-enough parenting, is really what we’re going for. So if you’re hard on yourself, please remember that.

So a securely attached person, as well, typically when you ask them about their lives as adults or as a teenager, they’re going to have a more balanced story. So that would look like, “I, you know, my—I had a pretty good childhood. My parents had this and this going on; they might have been stressed at this time, but I know they did their best. I remember that attention piece; I know they did their best; I know that we—there’s a lot of love in the house; we weren’t perfect, and I was happy.” All right. So we’re holding both the imperfection and the family, which is always going to be there, and the fact that we felt that love and care and support. Okay. They’re self-reflective; they’re able to look at themselves and feel whole enough to be okay with being wrong, right? If we are thinking that we are never wrong, we didn’t make any mistakes, or whether we didn’t have anything to forgive with our child, we didn’t do anything that could have hurt the child, that—that’s a really strong indication of a knothole self, a feeling too insecure to admit that we are imperfect, right? And I call this something that my therapist says—she talks about having this internal stuffing that fills us up, and this is what Brene Brown will call our sense of self, and Markus will call this sense of self, or this ability to feel whole despite being imperfect. Okay.

So the second style—and there’s two under this umbrella—is the anxious attachment style. So we have anxious ambivalent and anxious avoidant. Okay, let’s talk about the ambivalent side of things. In the strange situation, the ambivalently attached child struggles to take in the parent’s return, feel soothed by it. So they might punish the parents by screaming more; they might hit and scream more or just not be soothed by the parent’s return. And what is causing this is—is the inconsistency in parental emotional support. So maybe the child sometimes feels their parents there, and then other times the parents are too preoccupied with their own emotional state or their own nervous system state—their depression, their anxiety, their stress, their trauma, their grief—whatever’s unresolved in the parent, the child is going to pick that up and feel that the parent doesn’t have enough emotional capacity to hold the child in that moment. So—or—or they’re intrusive, right? They’re overly involved; they are—they might not really recognize, let’s say, the child is in a flow of play and doesn’t want to be further but doesn’t have the communication tools to say that, and the parent comes in and interrupts them or pulls a toy away and has them redirects them to something else. So this is what you’ll see in infants that are in developing attached, and usually the parenting style—so it’s this back-and-forth push and pull, or they don’t trust that the parent will be there consistently because either overly in it or not enough or too removed. So the parent usually is anxiously ambivalent and feels anxious, perhaps as an example, when approaching the child—like maybe a mother or father feels insecure about their ability to parent, and they come to the child with that anxiety. The child picks that up, takes it in through their mirror neurons at all different parts of the brain, the nervous system, and—and sponges that in. So they’re sponging in the adult’s internal state, and that is starting to wire the brain—that child’s brain—in a way that is going to copy that parent’s internal state, right? So again, the ambivalently attached child will push and pull; an adult will push and pull in relationships because they can’t trust that the person will be there consistently. Okay.

And then the anxiously avoidant side is—is the other end of the spectrum. So usually you’re going to see the ambivalent—the ambivalently attached child—kind of come in as adults; they’re really wanting to maybe enmesh, or they’re wanting to really engage with somebody; they will chase somebody; they want that connection; they want it to be really secure, but because they feel so insecure about it and so scared and nervous that it’s going to be taken away, they will push a lot harder in relationships than—than other people with a securely attached child would. Okay.

So then on the other side of the spectrum is the avoidantly attached child, and this—in the strange situation, the child is going to appear to be unaffected by the parent leaving and by the parent’s return. Okay. So they might just be playing—nothing—but effect—no sort of emotional clue, at least externally, that they’re upset by the parent leaving. Okay. However, when—when hooked up to brain scans, what we find in the anxiously avoidant person is that their nervous systems are highly dysregulated, meaning they are extremely stressed and anxious when the parent leaves and when they return. Okay. And usually this is when a parent doesn’t have a capacity to be present; they’re pretty aloof themselves, and it goes back to that intention—the child picking up that there is no internal intention in my caregiver to know me, to spend time with me in a way that really allows me to explore who I am, and the parent maybe doesn’t have the capacity or the tools or their own inner knowing to be present for a child and help them know themselves. Okay. So again, there’s no internal intention in my caregiver to know me. So then that results in the child starting to see reality as purely on the physical plane, and a—they will struggle in their lives to be filled with an internal world of emotion. So I usually see this—somebody that doesn’t know how they feel; they really struggle to notice any feelings or tell me what’s going on besides good and bad, and it can just result in a blindness to be able to see inside of themselves and in others. So they might not be aware of their impact on others emotionally, for instance. Okay.

And the fourth style is disorganized attachment. This is more rare; this happens when the caregivers are both the source of fear and the source of comfort. So remembering that every child has to attach to something, and so if we think about like Romanian orphans that didn’t have that attachment system and all the issues that came up with that—children can really literally die. And so in this instance, with a disorganized attachment style, the caregivers are again both—both the source of fear—so maybe they are in a war zone and having severe trauma responses, that could be in their own—just in their own fear state, or they could be abusive, or they could be just really angry and scary to the child. And then, at the same time, because the child has to attach, they are the source of comfort as well. So it creates this very confusing disorientation or confusing pull between how to respond to the caregiver. So in—in the strange situation, what they would find is that the child would freeze in response to the caregiver returning; they would rock themselves back and forth; they would walk in circles or crawl in circles. So there—again, they’re stuck between the retreat—wanting to get away from the person because they’re scary—and also the approach. So they’re literally frozen in between these two desires. And usually the parent—again—that has unresolved issues of grief, trauma, which could be again “big T” or “little t” trauma or loss, anything like that. Okay.

So in research, what they’re finding is that there are certain parenting behaviors that will foster attachment styles or certain attachment styles. So a responsive, consistent, securely attached parent will usually help create a securely attached child. Now, this doesn’t—this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the child then undergoes another traumatic event or the loss of somebody else, and that could impact their attachment system later in life. Okay. So this is just the initial attachment style, but that can always be impacted later in life, but this is very formative. So a dismissive, rejecting, or distant parent usually is going to be avoidantly attached themselves and will create an avoidant attachment system in a child because the child isn’t able to trust that the parent will be there for them at all, usually. So if you just think about like where does my—for instance, where does my communication with my child fall? Am I consistently responsive? Am I warm? Am I loving? Am I learning the tools that Evoke’s teaching us, right? Or—or do you have a pattern of being dismissive or rejecting, minimizing your child’s feelings, or saying things like, “It’ll be okay,” right? Sometimes it’s such a small thing, and—and so many people say it like it’s okay—you know, the child’s upset, and they don’t feel like it’s okay, right? So it’s a way—it’s a subtle way of dismissing the child’s feeling. And entangled, preoccupied, or intrusive or inconsistent parenting style is going to create more of this ambivalence—that the child’s wants space sometimes because the parent’s sometimes intrusive, and other times they really want the connection because the parents are always there. Okay. So entangled could be another word for codependent. And then if the parent is frightening or confusing or fearful—that they have unresolved, again, trauma or grief—that usually tends to create a more disorganized style in the child. And again, these styles are going to impact the child’s adult relationships and the way they walk through the world; it’s kind of like the software that’s running in the back of their mind throughout their life. Okay.

So back—going back to “little t” trauma—it’s just as impactful as “big T” traumas when they happen consistently over time. So we can think about attachment system or attachment traumas could look like things that are causing anxiously ambivalent or avoidant or disorganized styles—those ruptures, or the—what we call a mess—we missed somebody; we didn’t quite get them; we didn’t quite tune in well enough—can create, if it happens consistently over time, a lack of emotional safety and—and—and can be as impactful as a “big T” trauma. So, for example, found family patterns that persist over months of years—okay—that—that can foster that kind of emotional—that lack of emotional safety. Okay.

And so what is emotional attunement? This is—this is something that we are teaching your children at Evoke all the time, and it’s—and it’s basically empathy, right? If we—it’s their ability to tune in to others or to our child—your child—and anyone, for that matter. Okay. And the child’s brain is organized again by the experience of their parent, and the emotional attunement happens, and their ability to emotionally attune is usually a reflection of your ability to emotionally attune to them. Okay. So how—how aware you are to empathize with them and—and just to remember, too, that so many of these skills—so many people don’t—haven’t learned, and I just kind of want to put that out there again as a reminder—remember that you’re learning these tools, and a lot of times it’s like learning a whole new language, and we’re learning ways in which we could have done things differently and areas of growth, and that is part of the human experience. Okay. So I really want to normalize this—it’s not just parents at Evoke; it’s not just parents of the kids in wilderness therapy—you’re in treatment; it’s many people struggle with this in the world in general. Okay. So it’s also the ability to feel another person’s feelings because you’ve experienced them yourself and can recognize and name them. Okay. So it’s—I have looked at my own shadow, my own unresolved issues, and I know what it’s like to explore myself deeply, and I can have empathy for that, for example. Okay.

The way that this happens—in an infant, for example—is let’s say with a newborn, they really have no sense of where their body ends and the world begins, right? Again, they don’t have the organization—their brain—to understand what they are, who they are. And so the child might cry, and the parent will do a few things—hopefully they will go and try to soothe the child; they will try to feed the child; they will check their diaper. And then if that’s not working—none of those things are working—then—then maybe the kid’s sick, yeah? And the response of the parent—tune in and saying, “Oh, we’re going to try these different things,” and the child then feels relief—let’s say they needed a diaper change—the child then feels relieved, and that’s better. Okay, I know that—that now I understand—in my brain—feeling in myself is associated with this. Okay. So they’re learning their needs—out of the parent responds appropriately to them. Okay.

Another example—a little more concrete—is a toddler is upset because they can’t have the toy and they don’t—or they don’t want to share, let’s say. So attunement would be the parent saying, “It seems like you’re really upset and maybe disappointed”—it’s kind of a big word for a toddler—just go with me here with this example, right? “It seems like you’re really upset and disappointed about this.” So the parent is noticing—that looks like upset or sadness or rage, and I’m going to name that—and then the child learns, “Oh, this feeling in my body is sadness,” and then they start to learn the words for their internal state. Okay. So the parent must be able to sense into when the child wants contact and when they want space and be able to respond accordingly and simultaneously be able to manage their own feelings about the child’s wants and—

Needs right? Maybe the parent wants contact, and the child doesn't. It's not the child's job to take care of those feelings for their parent. The parent needs to regulate that themselves by getting support from another adult, so the child doesn't feel burdened by their caregiver's emotional state. Okay, okay. So how to heal? Here's the million-dollar question: how to heal? So this quote: the best predictor of how a child did in terms of their attachment to their parent was the way that parent had made sense of his or her life, or their life. That it wasn't what happened to you; it's actually how you made sense of what happened to you.

Okay, so this idea that we can just move on from our childhood is not—and just get over it, or not look at it, or not work with it, or not discover other parts of it, or say, "I already know everything there is to know about my childhood or my wounding"—is not effective in terms of helping our kids. Okay, so the research shows that if you don't pause and reflect in terms of what you remember and how you draw meaning from what you remember from your life, your kids, whether you want them to or not, will receive the kinds of negative things that you received that you hadn't made sense of. So it's kind of like this—throws this—this—look, play—it's a—some kind of wounding—and you could think about it like an ice cube of trauma. I made it—it's a little teeth trauma—a wound there—and it's kind of like passing the hot potato, or the—the ice cube—on to your child because it's not been resolved.

Okay, and so the more you can unpack yourself, your life, understand who you are as an adult, how your emotional responses are a direct result of your life experiences, right, and be able to own your imperfections—that is the secret sauce here, folks. So because then—been yer—then you're defrosting that ice cube for them; you're cooling off the hot potato and able to say, "Here's the work that I've done," and that will massively impact their ability to feel responsible for themselves because you just showed them how to do the work because you're doing it. Okay, and so this is why ongoing psychotherapy for parents is critical, and why ongoing—them—self-care. I'm always like, "My parents, please take care of yourself; go on vacation. It's okay if your kids are at Evoque and you go on vacation. If you go get a massage, whatever it is, to be—go—doing the work"—or in 12-step groups. We asked our parents at Evoque to go to at least six meetings so that we can look at how—really—the—the 12-step meetings are about how to be in a relationship in a healthy way and how to work through codependency. Right, that's kind of a tangent, but this ongoing work and self-care is critical, especially while your child is with us at Evoque and in their next steps.

Okay, again, this is—this is a parallel process, and it's critical. The best thing that you can do for your child in this time is to know yourself and to take care of yourself and to learn yourself and be open to learning more about things about yourself that you didn't know. Okay, and this is really what we mean by supporting your child. I think sometimes parents don't quite understand what I mean by that when I say, "What is support gonna look like at home?" Right? Yes, it's the tangible things like therapy and maybe parent coaching and maybe a home contract, but this is what I'm talking about here: more of the subtle soft skills of support, okay, that—that need to be worked on by every member of the family.

Okay, so how do we build the neural circuits for resilience and kindness in ourselves and in children? So if thinking about how do we impact our kids so that they can be more resilient and kinder, it's this idea of being versus doing with your child. So the right brain likes to be with—what is it? It's—it's art critic room, or creative side of the brain; it's not trying to fix everything. It creates a tune—ment and empathy, and this is the side of the brain that turns on when we are just with—when we're not trying to change their feeling, change their mind, tell them why they should feel something else. Why do we—you're doing something already just by being together. That quality time is so important. This is why we—we often say, "Please don't bring any gifts or food or things when you come visit your child," because we want to teach the child that being together is enough, and that you, as a parent, your presence as a parent is enough without all the gifts and—be—even just bringing in a little outside food, for instance. Like, you are enough as a parent; your presence is enough and is really sacred to your child. A lot of the times they really love seeing parents in the field. And then the—the left brain is more of that doing—guide. It's our verbal processing center; it's our logical mind; it's more associated with the—the thing—neocortical centers in the brain that are—that create our cognitive—cognitive—or just our cognitions, our thoughts, right? And it's the side that's scheduling things, that's organizing things, that is managing their kids' lives—right, appointments, school, anything, soccer—and they miss—in all the doing, they're missing the chance to just be present with the child.

Okay, and so if I don't take the time to align with you and really try to understand where you are emotionally, I will miss you. We—it's like—it's like strangers passing in the night, right? Or two ships passing in the dark; you're gonna miss one another, and we—we won't know each other more deeply or understand one another more deeply. Okay, and so kindness and resilience come from being able to connect with my own inner world to the degree that I can then relate to others and sense what it might be like to be in shame or to be in sadness or to be experiencing anger, right? And there are a lot of cultural stimuli and—and pressure in family systems that focus on, again, external stimuli, like this idea that a child can't be bored. I think is one of the most damaging things that we can do for our children—to not let them be okay with being bored. And you know, it's okay to just stare at the wall; they'll get creative; they have to learn to just be—to be okay—like digging in the dirt and finding worms, right? And if we're so anxious we can't—we'll just let our child be—like we want to be connected to them, for instance, on through our phones as an example, all the time, then we are not showing—we're not even showing an example of self-care; we're showing just an over-focus or an over-emphasis on needing outside stimuli to feel okay.

Okay, so this also goes back, and this is—this is really what mindfulness is—is just being present and being aware of myself, what's going on around me—yourself, your child—and it's a buzzword for a reason, and it's been around for thousands of years for a reason, right? Different teachers have talked about this throughout time because it's so important. And so how to help your child? So again, it's the upstairs brain—to oversimplify it—we've got those upstairs brain—at the cortical RAM—it's very thin—again, that letter of the law, the black and white, the newer brain as far as evolution goes—that is controlling—brats—and this is where common behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, CBT, DBT, acceptance and commitment therapy—these are all working with thought patterns—and then the downstairs brain—everything that is subcortical or more emotional—again, it's like that spirit of the law; it's the gray area; it's the fight, flight, freeze—older part of the brain—which is stimulated in a trauma response. So again, going back to the idea that trauma is not in the story; it's in the nervous system—and it's emotion and motivation. So the motivation of your child actually lies in these deeper emotional parts of the brain, and that upstairs brain—also, when we think about willpower, for instance—it's a lot of our willpower is happening just in that neocortical center, the front—that part behind the frontal lobe—and there's—we only have a limited amount; it's like a muscle; it reads like a gas tank—and we—the more we use it in the beginning of the day, the more it starts to wear out towards the end of the day. So if you notice, it's harder to work out at the end of the day because you have less willpower at the end of the day because you've got to use it for a million other things.

Okay, so when we're thinking about, again, motivation as a side note here, or thinking our children just can't get things together, a lot of that's happening in that newer part of the brain. So we—what we want to help our children do is we want to name it to tame it—so be with them, regulate yourself, right? Notice yourself: "What is my emotional state?" This takes work; this takes years of practice. I mean, this isn't ever a—never-ending practice—and—and it's this beautiful infinite place of growth. Okay, so you can think about it as: I'm just continuing to learn about myself and my own emotional responses. The more you—more you know yourself and the more you work on—on learning tools to regulate yourself, you can then have more capacity to hold your child's emotional state. Okay, so when you have presence of mind, mm-hmm, do you then have the ability to be with them in a calm, regulated way? When you get dysregulated—meaning—flipping your lid—or not able to stay calm or hear them—right—then that's—that's the time for an adult plan. I've always been encouraging adult timeouts because we want to be able to say, "This—you know what? I don't have the capacity right now," and Brad Reid, for instance—'cause I talk with him a lot about this—is that this—this—this idea of—"I think I need to go for a walk"—and he won't always say like, "I don't have the capacity to hold this stuff right now"—those children—because they wouldn't always get that—or, "I'm gonna go to a baseball game," or he'll go in the other room, right? Let's see, we can remove ourselves—we're not feeling that ability to hold space for our children. And so two things to remember: connect with them—connect and redirect. So this is how—what Daniel Siegel, who talks a lot about this attachment system—he's a researcher out of UCLA—helps—these are the two words that he uses: connect and redirect. So connect with my right hemisphere—remember that creative, present side—this looks like: "I can absolutely understand why you would be so upset about that; that makes sense to me," even if you don't agree. Hey, you don't have to agree with how they feel. If we can remember that they are feeling a certain way because of a—perhaps—of thought that they're thinking or a trauma response that they're having, right? And so the emotion is coming from a place that maybe feels uncontrollable for them, and we—we want to just be able to have empathy for that, even if we don't agree or even if it seems ridiculous or even if it seems way outta left field. That ability to just validate: "That makes so much sense to me; that—that—that sounds really painful," or, "I'm so excited for you." This is not just about the—these difficult emotions; it's also about their joy. Can you mirror them and really be with them in their joy? Of—"I just busted a fire," for instance—"Wow!" That—like—just feeling the joy in yourself—what would that mean for me? So it's really that empathic resonance of: "I'm with you in this place, wherever you are." Okay, and that will almost instantly soothe their system, right? So you connect, and then you redirect. So, "Okay, let's talk about that. What is it that you're hearing? Oh, I'm hearing that—I'm wondering if you're feeling scared, or I wonder if this is what you're feeling, or you're feeling anxious," or the question that I like is: "How do you know? How do you know that's what you feel?" And then you can start to talk about it, but if you start going into talking about it or connecting or—or—or starting to redirect them too soon without the validation, the behavior will increase; the emotion will increase because they're not feeling heard, and people get louder when they don't feel heard.

Okay, so again, this calms our system down, and in order for kindness to show up, we have to be willing and able to look inward; we have to be able to regulate ourselves to manage and know our feelings and then express them and be able to put them aside for the time being to be with the child's feelings and state—FBA. Okay, so how does wilderness fit into this? Wilderness therapy is experiential therapy, so we are hiking, making fires; it's primitive living, and it's intensive, integral, holistic practices to help bring all these parts of them together. And so we're forging this resilience, the persistence, the cooperation, and importantly, increase distress tolerance and the ability to handle and manage difficult feelings. Okay, also this healthy, secure attachment with new caregivers—so primarily staff and therapists—the emotional—to—that happens in the field is in a secured, structured environment, and this is why we see kids do so well in wilderness because it is so structured and so safe and contained. And for more about this and more about why they might regress when they go on to their next step—whether it's aftercare, whatever the next step is—the—the—the structure is a little less, and so that we have a podcast on that as well if you want to listen to that—that's a really helpful one if you're wondering about what it's like and why kids will regress. You can go back—there's a podcast called "For Aggression" and something else; you'll find it in there—but they are seen and heard, and so that they can then know what it's like to feel that they have a new experience of what it's like to be securely attached—to both have the emotional attunement and also the healthy boundaries and the expectations that we provide in Evoque. And then this creates a new experience for attachment. The way that we create a new experience for attachment is working in the here and now in a relational way between therapists and client or staff and client, right? And so here and now, again, is the basis for this change and growth. All right, so the take-home tonight is: when you learn and heal yourself, you change and increase your capacity to be with your child, which then changes their capacity to handle the challenges that life throws at them. Okay, and secure attachment is attainable even as adults. Okay, so this is—if this is hard for you to think about or—or work with—just remember that it requires patience and work with a securely attached other—usually a therapist—and self-reflection. Okay, all right, take live questions, right? So I'm gonna share it—yeah, any—any topic-related questions or comments we'll take now.

Four—so one question is for a twenty-year-old graduate of Evoque who's doing quote-unquote well but has avoidant and ambivalent attachment issues from several traumas. How can we, as parents, encourage therapy when the child feels he is done with that? Yeah, do we just wait for it and let him have his journey? I love that last piece. I think letting him have his journey is—always—letting go of—yeah, your attachment to the outcome first and foremost, which is so hard—that—that part as parents is so incredibly difficult—to let go a little bit of our—of our child and their ability to do life—and I'm not sure—so avoidant, ambivalent—sounds like he might be more avoidant; those are two separate ones. So if he's more on the avoidant side, he's more disconnected, has trouble with his feelings, has trouble connecting to others, whereas the ambivalent side would be: he struggles in relationships; it's kind of push-pull in relationships. I think to continue to support him, hear him, validate the fact that he feels that he's done with that—"I quote-unquote"—again, that validation—being with—and then noticing what's underneath that, right? Because "done with that" is a defense. "I feel done; I don't want to work on myself anymore." What is underneath the defense, right? What is underneath the wounding underneath it? You know, there's always a wounding underneath the defense. And so maybe there's a piece of him that just feels exhausted. Sometimes there is—there—we are so exhausted from all the therapy; we do need just more fun and play and—and self-care practices that aren't so heavily therapeutic—while also balancing being done with that. So it sounds like you might just be kind of burnt out. And if you have other comments or questions you want to add to that, I can—well, clarify what you think his attachment style is; I can answer it or—not—perspective—but—okay, so my understanding of attachment theory is that there's a fair amount of crossover with the different categories. Can you explain? Yeah, so part of the theory is that—again—just be—but our brains are plastic, meaning that they're malleable throughout our lives, even as adults—that's the newest neurobiological research—and the—we can be—we can have a certain attachment style with—with one person—with one caregiver, let's say—and another attachment style with a different caregiver. So what this creates is, in our adult relationships then, if—so let's say I've got a more avoidant attachment style with my dad and a secure attachment style with my mom—I can—I might meet somebody who triggers my avoidant style with my dad because the psyche is always trying to heal itself, right? So we are going to attract in the people and experiences that we need that are gonna trigger the things in us that need healing, right? So we can crossover and have different kinds of relationships with different kinds of people, okay, until we can heal. Oh, I've got some avoidant—avoidant tendencies. And I love that question because it is not black-and-white; nothing about the mind is really that black-and-white, especially when we're—when we're dealing with emotion. So I think the more that we can hold—we can all hold this—and this sort of expanded state of mind of like, "Wow, this is a complex thing, and I can show up in different ways for different relationships"—what is pretty much always true is we are going to recreate those relationships with our adult attachment figures that are a reflection or a mirror of the ones we had in childhood. Okay, and this is often why—why we—I like to joke that we keep dating the same person in a different body, right? If we don't learn from—or we keep interacting with people that are seem like the same person but in different states. Okay, any other questions? So if you're wanting to learn more about any of these things, we have the next cascade—the next parent workshop is next week—ends at Cascades Evoque Cascades have been—been—doggin'—beautiful—Bendel—again—and we have one every month; they alternate between Entrada and Cascade, and that is a powerful experience for parents to connect with other parents who also have their children in wilderness therapy, and I have seen that be incredibly healing because they don't feel so alone. I think sometimes this experience of being a parent with a child in wilderness can feel incredibly alone and alienating. The more support you can get, the better off you'll be. All right, again, it's that managing your emotions about things with other adults—not your child—so that's coming up next weekend's. We have a Finding You intensive that starts I think next week on the 18th—not—a deep dive into who you are, what is your work; it's kind of like a therapy—therapy accelerator—a therapy jumpstart. We have other professional retreats and family intensives that we can create—that we can create custom for families, and I think I could be missing other things, but those—that's on the docket coming up—and—and then I will be in Chicago. So if you're in Chicago next week on Wednesday night, I will be leading a parent support group next Wednesday night in Chicago. And then thank you. Yes, so email Melanie at evoketherapy.com to RSVP for that, and that's next Wednesday, July 18th, 6:30–8:30 p.m. at the Renaissance Chicago North Shore. And then I will be—leading the webinar the week following as well, so we can hop on and connect then as well. Okay, all right, everybody, if there are no other questions—yeah—okay, Entrada—yeah, August 11th to the 12th—that's the other parent workshop. Cascades is next weekend—yeah, July 21st—May 2nd—you can contact Gale at evoketherapy.com. Suits trips—it's like a—like therapy light or adventure therapy—or anywhere from 1, 7, 14, or 28 days—and then our next webinar—I believe we have one more—okay, okay—one more follow-up question: Is there a place to talk to your adult child about the diagnosis of what kind of attachment they have if they have not ever been told about it or seemed to receive it? I'm thinking that that means that they don't—maybe they don't know; they've never heard about it before—and is there a way to talk to your adult child about the diagnosis? Yeah, I think you can always talk about this—and—and just also remember that it's not a diagnosis; it's just a style, and it can be healed and worked on—and what I would perhaps start with if I was talking to my adult child about it is I would say, "You know, I just was listening to this webinar—podcast—through Evoque, and I learned this about myself, and these attachment styles—are you open to us talking about it and discussing it further because I think it's really interesting, and I wonder how—what you think you are or what—how you think you move through the world"—and ask for their collaboration in that—and—and even writing about it—any letters to them—you know, starting from your experience and owning—your—your style is always so impactful for a child to see their parent take accountability for themselves or—to—to name things inside of themselves—and then you're showing them just through that how to do it for themselves, right? That's what I would—I would start there and start from that kind of collaborative spirit—"I'd love to talk with you about this, and I find it really interesting, and I'd love to hear what you think you are"—and—I—yeah, yeah, this—this is really—this has changed my life dramatically just knowing these things about myself, so I hope—okay, here we go. Thank you; this is excellent; a lot of aha moments. Thank you; excellent presentation. Thanks, everybody; it's really nice to be with you tonight. I love supporting parents and—with you in your journey, and please let us know if there's anything else we can do to support you. We're always here for you on this journey, and I really respect the work that you are doing for you—in just being on this webinar and listening to these podcasts and being in your own therapy. I have so much respect for that because it's so powerful for your child—and that's the hard—mitii—gritty—rubber meets the road—work that is—is hard. Okay, and so I just want to affirm all of you for being here and doing this work with us. Okay, all right, everybody, thank you so much for being on, and we will see you soon. Have a wonderful rest of your evening.