Transcription
If you don't punish bad behavior, you're basically reinforcing that. Is that true? Just like we don't punish and reward kids into learning how to swim, punishment and rewards are purely behavior focused, they do not teach skills. I'm Dr. Becky Kennedy. I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm a mom of three and I am the founder of the online parenting platform called Good Inside.
So, I began my career as a clinical psychologist, teaching parents how to give timeouts and punishments and rewards. That's how I was trained. And so, there were all these moments in my private practice. Parents would come in, my kids having a tantrum about something ridiculous, my kid is lying to me, my kid is talking back, whatever it was. And I'd say, "Okay, let's learn how to give a timeout. Let me teach you how to give a timeout. Let me teach you how to do a sticker chart." So I was doing that for a while.
Then I had my own kid and I also just started to reflect on my own childhood and what moments really helped me and what moments didn't. Plus something interesting was happening in my private practice. In my private practice beyond seeing parents to talk about issues with young kids, I was seeing adults for therapy for couples therapy. And I felt really good about the way I was working with adults. It was a combination of, you know, internal family systems and attachment theory and sematic work. And I'm just a very practical person. So I'd always give homework for the week and so many different things. And I watched adults change their lives. And what I knew is that when adults would come to me for therapy and say things like, "Oh, I know I talked about asking my boss for a promotion, but I just didn't do it." Or, "I know we're working on my anger, but I yelled this week." I would never say to those people, "Give me your phone. No dessert for a week. I want you to leave my office and come back when you don't yell. I want you to leave my office and come back when you ask for that promotion." I mean, can you imagine the therapist? I I would hope any client would say, "Well, I'm never coming back to see you again." Why would adding shame and blame help me improve my behavior? Like, literally, what's your theory for why that would even work? And it just struck me because I'd have these sessions where I was seeing adult adult and then parent of a young kid and I just started thinking there is no way that what adults need to change could be at complete odds with what children need to grow. And then I realized, wait, I actually think we're like causing all of these problems in childhood and trying to fix them in adulthood. It's just a remarkably inefficient system, which is not a way of saying I think we can be perfect parents. We cannot. And we're all going to struggle with things and I hope my kids go to therapy to talk about things in their life. But we don't have to approach our kids with punishment and harshness. And if we do, why would we expect them to actually thrive in adulthood? We're actually trying to unwire all of that self-criticism and self-lame that we have as adults from our childhood so we can finally have a little bit more groundedness and perspective to actually make the productive changes we want in our life.
Okay. So, I was in this moment in my private practice and I was seeing parents and I want to be honest, I was still kind of ignoring that feeling in me like, okay, well, here's how to do a timeout. Here's how to do the sticker chart. And one day in my private practice, all I can say is the dissonance I think in my body, it just became too loud. I honestly couldn't focus. And I had these parents in front of me and I was teaching them how to do a timeout. And I ended up saying to them, "I'm sorry. I actually don't believe anything I'm telling you right now." And not surprisingly, they looked at me and they were like, "Why am I paying you any money? I'm going to leave your office right now." And I was like, "Hold on. I I feel like I just need a little bit of time. I know there's a better better way. And I was actually thinking like I just want to take everything that I know helps adults and helps them rewire and reverse engineer it to parents to give to kids right away. But I but I didn't know how exactly yet. And I knew I wanted that approach to be super concrete and practical because the one thing about timeouts and sticker charts that I think parents love and me too is that it just tells you what to do. We're like, "Well, just tell me what to do. We need something to do." But I was like, "We can definitely upgrade what to do from a sticker chart and a timeout." And you know, these parents essentially my office were like, "We're just going to go find someone else to talk to." And I was like, "I totally get it. I'm so sorry. And yes, I will definitely refund you for the session."
And then I started this just surge, maybe is the word, of new ideas. It's like once I finally said this thing, I had the openness to write down so many ideas. And I think what started was just stripping away all the assumptions that we've all accepted as true. If you don't punish bad behavior, you're basically reinforcing that. Is that true? Like I have moments that I'm not proud of with my husband and he doesn't punish me, but I don't think he's reinforcing bad behavior. And if he said to me, Becky, if you yell at me one more time, I'm not going to eat dinner with you for a week. I I just don't think that would inspire me to change in a positive way. Now, I don't expect him to be kind of a doormat in the other way, but if he said, "Wa, that was not okay." And there's probably something going on with you because you don't usually act like that. And let's get to the bottom of that. I actually think that's probably what you need. And honestly, it's probably the thing that's also going to help you change. So, let's figure that out together. No part of me would think, "Oh, my husband really lets me walk all over him." It's actually a crazy thought that we would only have if we have an incredibly negative view of humans, which I do not have.
And when I started to question this approach, I was left with two foundations really. Number one, we are born good inside. That doesn't excuse our bad behaviors at all, but inside we are born good. And actually, that's really helpful to know because it creates a gap between good identity and bad behaviors. And it allows us to wonder, well, why would a good person do a bad thing? And from that question, we can actually intervene much more effectively. And the other thing I realized is kids are just born with all the feelings and none of the skills to manage those feelings. And feelings without skills always come out as bad behavior. And so the idea of good inside is that we can separate behavior from identity. And in doing that, we don't become permissive parents. we actually become effective leaders who can teach kids skills they didn't have in the first place so that not only can they improve their behavior, they can actually grow up and be resilient, successful adults. So let's jump into this idea about how behavior is different from identity and then very practically how that idea comes to life in managing your kids difficult behavior.
The tantrum, the sibling arguing about something so silly, maybe the I hate you to your face or lying, all those hard situations. We have a habit as humans for many reasons of seeing someone's bad behavior and kind of assuming we know everything we need to know about the person. Someone's late to work, that person is lazy. Our kid hits another kid, they're a hitter, right? And then even we take that moment, we tend to project forward, oh, they're always going to be the bad kid in class. are never going to have friends. And if you think about what's really happening here is there's a conflation of behavior with identity. And one of the reasons this happens is behavior is observable and identity isn't. So the quickest thing for our mind to do is we see behavior hitting, we assume identity, bad kid. But actually this isn't what's happening. This is what's happening. Behavior is identity and there's no space in between. The other reason we tend to do this is because most of us grew up in homes where we were seen as our worst behavior. Nobody saw us as a good kid identity who was having a hard time behavior where those things were separate. So we've actually wired those two things together.
One of the life-changing ideas, I think, around good inside is to separate behavior from identity. And this is as life-changing in parenting your kid as it is in relating to yourself as it is in your marriage or your work relationship. And what's really important is people say, "Oh, so you're just letting your kid off the hook. They're a good kid having a hard time, so it's okay that they're hitting a sibling." No, not at all. I've never seen my kid hit another kid and say, "Uh, let out that anger. You're a good kid letting out anger. I love it. That would be so bizarre. Seeing my kid as a good kid having a hard time allows me to intervene more like a coach than someone who's just delivering punishment. That's really important because when you realize, hold on a second, I have a good kid having a hard time. In the moment, I'm going to swoop in. I might even say, whoa, I'm not going to let you hit your brother. I'm going to pick my kid up and carry them to the side. And I might, if I'm on my game, even say, "You're a good kid having a hard time, and I'm going to help you through it." It's one of the most life-changing things for kids to hear. And so many parents have said that simple phrase, saying to their kid, "You're a good kid having a hard time has deescalated a hard situation in a way nothing else they've ever tried has." And if you think about it, that makes sense. Think about your own hard moment and think about the way people look at you like you're a bad person. Maybe it's happened in a recent argument with a partner or at work and you just get this look like, "I see your bad behavior and I kind of am treating you like a bad person." We have shame. We spiral. We get worse. There's nothing more powerful in adulthood as someone saying to you some version of, "Hold on a second. You're a good person. You just said something that I have a feeling you didn't really mean. Let's take a moment to cool off. We can try this again." In our hardest moments, we are all desperate to have someone else see the inherent goodness inside of us. And sometimes we need someone else to see it before we can access it ourself.
Let's take lying as a situation. Very triggering when our kids lie to us. Recently had a parent say, "I have a Nest camera. I saw my teenager steal money from my drawer. I asked my teenager about it. They said, "Nope, I didn't do it." Separate but related. Never ask someone a question you know the answer to. You're actually just trying to catch them in a lie, which makes anyone defensive. But if we think about this as a good kid having a hard time, we see it very differently. It doesn't mean I'm going to throw my kid a party for stealing money. Not at all. But I'd probably say something like this. Hey, I saw that you took money from my drawer. Hold on a second. This is not about to be a punishment. That would be way too much short-term thinking. I know you're a good kid and there must have been something going on that you didn't think you could come ask me for money for whatever you wanted it for. And it's true. I might end up saying no. But it's really important that we have the type of relationship where you know you could come to me. Honestly, that's probably only becoming more and more important as you get older and things get even trickier in your life. So what was going on for you? I just want to actually understand understanding what was happening is so much more important than the behavior itself because that's the only way we can get ahead of everything that's going to happen after.
Now I know what parents think. We traditionally think isn't that permitting the bad behavior? Understanding the reasons for a bad behavior is not at all the same thing as permitting behavior. And we don't think about that in any other way. If you think about a kid on a basketball team who's a really good player but has an awful couple games and you think about the coach saying, "Hold on a second. I'm taking you out for this game, but tomorrow let's go to the gym together. Let's really figure this out. What's going on with your layups and your passing? Everything is off. I'm on your team. I want to understand what's happening." I just don't know one parent who would say, "I don't want that coach for my kid. That coach is permitting bad behavior. That coach is basically telling my kid it's okay to have a bad game. It's bananas." None of us think that. You know what we all think? That's the coach I want. That coach actually is trying to get to the source of what was happening because that's the only way you can actually improve behavior.
So a lot of people ask me reward charts, timeouts, stickers. I feel like these have worked to improve behavior. Like why would I depart from these methods? So first of all, I'd call into question how effective these methods are. And also a lot of studies that so show short-term impact don't tell the whole story of child development. Anything that's fear-based sometimes you can get kids to short-term comply. I don't think that's data worth bragging about. What we know is that childhood is an amazing time for kids to learn the skills they are going to need for life. I don't know if any of us really think I learn skills by being punished. You do have a model of what not to do, I guess. But nobody's helping you know what to do.
Let's take jealousy as an example. Why do kids hit siblings? Sometimes they're just jealous. Oh, my sibling has a truck that I really want to play with in this moment. I'm jealous. I'm frustrated. I don't have the skills to manage those feelings. So, it comes out as a hit. Now I get a timeout for not hitting. And is that going to work? Well, fast forward many, many years. I don't think I'm going to be jealous of my sibling in my 20s that they have a toy truck that I don't have. But you better bet that when I see my sibling have a job that feels more successful than my job or own a home that is bigger than the home I can afford, I'm going to feel pretty jealous and frustrated. And if I don't have skills to manage those feelings, I don't know if it would come out as a hit, but it would come out as pretty toxic behavior. Skills aren't gifted to us with age. We don't magically become able to manage our emotions when we become 18. That's not how it works. We learn how to manage our emotions through our earliest relationships. I always tell parents, kids can't learn to tolerate feelings we can't tolerate in them. So if my kid is jealous and frustrated and that comes out as bad behavior and all I do is send them to their room, maybe short term for some kids, for people pleasing kids only, not for the non-peopleleasers, they just escalate when you punish them. My kid might look like, "Oh, I'm going to change my behavior. I'm just so terrified of my parent being upset with me." and I can get my kid to comply. I always find this interesting. I've never met one parent who says, "Oh, I'm so proud of my 30-year-old daughter. She is so compliant. She does everything people ask her to do. She is so attentive to what everyone wants of her that she's just always taking care of everyone else and doesn't really ever take care of her own needs or even know what they are. I've never heard that. Although that is the thing that leads to so many women essentially breaking down. You don't just get the skills to manage your own feelings at a certain developmental milestone. And punishment and rewards are purely behavior focused. They do not teach skills. Just like we don't punish and reward kids into learning how to swim, we teach them how to swim. We teach them skills. And importantly with swimming, we understand that just cuz I'm teaching a kid a skill, it doesn't mean my kid's going to swim tomorrow. It's actually interesting. We tolerate the length of time it learns how to swim as a parent. Even though those are very expensive lessons a lot of us put money toward. We know this is going to take time. And swimming is a skill. I think that's actually a very important life skill. Emotion regulation is an even more important life skill. And so how I want parents to start thinking is not just in terms of short-term behavioral compliance, which by the way works against someone later on, but actually I have this window of time where I can actually teach my kids the skills that are actually going to be the most important skills of their life. And punishments and rewards just don't teach skills.
So many times I'm asked, is good inside gentle parenting? I actually think the term gentle parenting has probably been misrepresented, but it's just not a term I identify with. So, I'm just going to put it over here. And one of the reasons I don't identify with it is I think some of our most important parenting moments, the word gentle just isn't a word I would use to describe the feeling I'm accessing in that moment. Some of my best parenting moments, even though they're the hardest, is when I do something that I just know needs to be done and is for my kid's best interest long term, but requires a lot of trickiness and hard feelings in the moment. And I think those moments call for sturdiness, like a lot of conviction. And really, if we zoom out, I think good inside is just a leadership approach. So, it's really a sturdy leadership approach. I love the word sturdy and I'm going to define it. But one of the reasons I love it is it has a feeling associated with it and it takes it out of just being a word and it does something in our body. If you think about someone in your life who you consider sturdy, you can kind of conjure up this thing about them where you can kind of locate them like oo I know where you are but they also were able to connect to other people. There's something happening there in just the feeling of the word. So if I think about a sturdy leader they're able to do two things at once. They're able to ground their decisions in their own values. They can embody their appropriate authority in a situation so they're connected to themselves. At the same time, a sturdy leader is able to understand other people, hear them out, maybe even understand their reactions and feelings. They're able to connect to other people. A sturdy leader at the same time can connect to themselves and someone else.
So, let me explain a metaphor because it's actually the best way of bringing this to life. So, imagine you're on a plane and you're a passenger. I'm a passenger, too. And it gets very, very turbulent. So turbulent that everyone is kind of screaming in the passenger cabin. OH MY GOODNESS. OH MY GOODNESS. OKAY, let's imagine three announcements you might hear from a pilot. Okay, announcement number one. Stop screaming back there. You're making a big deal out of nothing. You all ruin everything for me. Stop being dramatic. Now, I think we all know that wouldn't really make me feel better. First of all, I'm wondering, is the pilot missing the intense turbulence? And is the pilot so threatened by my being nervous that it kind of throws them off? Yesesh. That's kind of like when we say to our kids when they're melting down about not having ice cream for breakfast, you're so dramatic. You're making a big deal out of nothing. We kind of really lean with invalidation. I'm not able to connect to the other person. and see that their reality is real for them, even if it's not real for me. Okay, that's not the announcement we want. Here's pilot two. Also not the announcement we want. Oh no, turbulence. I'm opening up the cockpit doors. If anyone back there kind of knows what to do, please come in. Now, if you're like me, you're not even scared of the turbulence anymore. You're just terrified that this person is your pilot. So, what's happening there? The pilot loses themsself. In the first kind of situation, they lose connection to someone else. In the second, they lose connection to themsel. They see your feelings almost as contagious. You're nervous, that means I'm nervous. And we're in this exact same situation together. That's kind of when we say to our kid who's melting down over breakfast. Fine, have ice cream for breakfast. Just stop tantruming. And importantly, I'm not making that decision because I actually think I want to give my kid ice cream for breakfast, which could be my decision. I'm doing it because I really, really hate seeing my kid upset and their feelings kind of come into my body and I just want that feeling for me to stop.
Okay, let's get to the third pilot because I think this is the pilot we all want. Hey, I hear you screaming back there. I get it. You're nervous because it's so turbulent. That's okay. Scream away. Do your thing. I know what I'm doing. I've been through this before. And I'm going to stop this announcement now and go back to doing my job. And I know I'm going to get us to our destination shortly. Interestingly, the turbulence could stay the exact same, maybe even get a little worse. But suddenly, I have a deep breath of relief. Why? Two things that sturdy leaders do. They see your emotional reality as real, and they care about it while they are not overwhelmed by it themselves. That means they actually have a boundary between you and them. I can empathize with your feeling precisely because I'm not taking on the feeling myself. I can see that you believe you're in this storm. And at the same time, I can see calm and hope and safety on the other side. I can do both of those things at once. That's kind of when we say to our kid who's melting down about wanting ice cream for breakfast, I get it. You really want ice cream. Oh, I would want that, too. You wish you could have ice cream. And ice cream's not an option, sweetie. It's okay if you're upset. We're going to figure this out. And when you want, let me know something else you could have for breakfast. I can see my kids emotional reality, but I'm not taken over by it. And I have this sturdiness in the middle of the storm. And that's exactly the type of leadership our kids are looking for from us.
So, attachment theory really influences a lot of how I talk about day-to-day moments in parenting. Attachment theory was popularized by John Bulby and Mary Ainsworth a very long time ago. And really, the foundation of attachment theory is the idea that the nature of the relationship we form with our kid in their earliest years is something that impacts them for the rest of their life. Connection for kids is the key to their survival. It's really an evolutionary force. Attachment is the key evolutionary force for kids because for a very very long time, more than almost any other animal species, a human child truly can't survive on their own. Yes, they need food, shelter, water, but they get that from their parent. And so kids are always looking what allows me to stay connected to my parents, what parts of me are lovable and understandable and what parts of me kind of exist in aloneeness and those parts that exist in aloneeness become very dangerous, right? And often then have to get acted out. They're really learning with us. Who am I? What feelings am I allowed to have? What can I expect from people around me when we're going through hard situations? Is it okay to be mad at someone I love? Is it okay to mess up in a relationship? Do I have a pathway to recover? Or is that something that seems almost unreoverable? What parts of me get love and connection? And what parts of me are kind of met with we don't do that in this family and I kind of have to learn ooh danger put them away. And I take those lessons from my parent because in a way my parent is my world and I start to generalize them as I get older to the world. And so the nature of a relationship our kid forms with us becomes kind of a blueprint or a friend of mine named Mileik calls it her kids factory settings where I love that because we can change factory settings we can change a default and at the same time the factory settings our kid goes into adulthood with are pretty powerful.
For example, when my kid has a meltdown about something that I think is small in my adult life, but matters in my kid life. I don't know, maybe, oh, I'm not with Sophia in class. I can't go to school this year. My kids melting down. They're crying. It's all your fault. Of course, I have nothing to do with it. But if my general pattern of responding to this is something like, "You're being ridiculous. If you keep crying, I'm taking away, I don't know, fill in the blank with whatever it is." My kid does not learn. I'm having a big reaction to classes in second grade and I can respond more calmly next time. No, they learn a couple things. Number one, it's not safe in my closest relationships to feel upset. When I'm very upset about something in my life, I should expect the people close to me to be very turned off by that and want nothing to do with me. That's one lesson they learned. Another lesson they learned might be, "Oh, maybe I don't know how I feel." My parent did always tell me I overreacted to things, so I guess other people have a better sense of how I feel than I do. Now, if we just take those two lessons and we fast forward, this might sound obvious, but I always think about it. We have the same body today as we had our childhood. It's a collection of all of the memories. And our body likes to generalize. Just like you learn to look both ways before you cross the street early on, you could be in a totally different environment in adulthood. And if someone said, "You don't have to look both ways here. You can just cross the road. Cars won't hurt you." Your body literally wouldn't allow you to do that because it took an early lesson around safety and has generalized. It's true. I've never been to Tokyo, but I'm going to assume the same thing is true as it's always been. I'm going to look both ways to keep me safe. So now, let's say my kid is no longer in my house, and I'm making this up, is married to someone. And they're really upset about a bad meeting at work. Their body is going to kind of do an inventory. Is this safe, let's say, for me to talk to my husband about or am I basically going to expect my husband to tell me I'm making a big deal out of nothing? So then I don't talk about it. But the feelings remain. You know what probably happens? I don't know. I'm probably snapping at my husband about something totally irrelevant. I'm probably super short with my kids. I'm probably acting it out in some other ways because our feelings don't lie. That's one kind of legacy of attachment. Another legacy is when we invalidate our kids all the time, which sounds like, you're dramatic. You're making a big deal out of nothing. This is a disproportionate reaction. They doubt their emotions in really dangerous ways. I'm just going to go for it because I'm pretty direct. Let's picture a girl who's now at a bar at age 20 something, 25, and someone comes up to them and they're kind of flirty. It feels fun. Stranger, they don't know. And then it goes a step further. Come home with me. And that girl, let's say, initially has a feeling in her body like, oo, I don't know about this. Well, what's the attachment lessons that she might have learned early on in totally different situations, but the same circuits? Other people do tend to know how I should feel better than I do. And then she hears, "Come on, don't make such a big deal out of it. It's just going to be fun." It's true. I do tend to make a big deal out of nothing. And I know it's so easy to say that is crazy. That has nothing to do with freaking out about classes. In our body, in the inventory that happens around, do I trust my emotions? Do I listen to what's happening? Is something that's a big deal to me? Even if it's not a big deal to someone else, can I go with my gut or do I use someone else's reaction as a barometer of what I should do? Those are absolutely the same situations inside of our body.
Attachment theory is this idea that our earliest relationships form the blueprint for our later relationships. But internal family systems is basically the idea that inside our bodies we have many many parts of us. So if you put that together you could also say the way we develop parts when we're young will also play out in our adult relationships when we're older. And what internal family systems posits which is so powerful is that all of our different parts came from an adaptive place. They were all trying to figure out in our earliest years, what do I need to do to survive and adapt in my family of origin? So, for example, let's say anger was not something you could safely express toward your parent. The truth is anger is a powerful emotion. So, when we're young, we tend not to say to our parent, "I'm angry at you." We tend to say, "I hate you." Right? Or, "You're the worst dad in the world. you don't do anything for me. Even maybe after our parents just took us to an amusement park. Right now, when that feeling comes out, if we were met with some type of danger, right? Go to your room. You don't say something like that to me. No insert punishment here for a week or maybe worse. Maybe we were hit. Then what does my body as a kid have to learn? I actually don't learn I should have expressed my anger in a better way. I actually learned anger is not a safe emotion. If I just didn't feel angry, I would have been a lot safer in my home.
Now, from an internal family systems perspective, how do we stop anger? It's kind of hard. It's a natural emotion. I develop a new part. It would actually be called, and it's so beautiful, a protector part that's trying to protect me from feeling that anger. It's trying to really help me stay safe. Now, the protector part might have to use some extreme methods. It might need to say to me, "You're a horrible, ungrateful person. No one else would feel this way." And I know that sounds mean. Dr. Becky, that doesn't sound adaptive, but anger is pretty powerful. And if it was so scary to express anger in your home, your body actually figured out how to develop a part that was equally as powerful to shut it down. Now, let's fast forward 20 years, 40 years. I think we know even theoretically we all get angry at the people we love. That happens. But just like attachment theory teaches us, what happens in our adult relationships becomes a lot of reactivation of our earliest lessons. So let's say you start to feel angry toward your partner. But then there's this protector part that's talking to you the same way as when you were eight. It doesn't know that it's 2025 or whatever year it is now. It still thinks it's, I don't know, 1980. So, it says to you, "Don't be angry. Do you not appreciate your partner? Something's wrong with you." So, you shut down anger. You shut down anger because of this protector part that used to protect you. Maybe isn't protecting you anymore, but it thinks it's protecting you. And then we all know what happens. We shut it down. We shut it down. And then there's a moment, oh boy, it comes out with such explosiveness, not because anything's wrong with us, but because we didn't kind of let out the steam earlier.
Now when I talk about this with people, people say, "Okay, so we just got to like get rid of the protector parts, right?" Well, we don't because from an internal family systems perspective, that part developed for a reason. We actually have to start by thanking that part. Thank you for all the years you kept me safe. You are right. You were doing a really important job. Expressing anger was not safe. And nobody helped me learn to express anger. And nobody gave me a runway as a young kid to know, well, of course Becky's not going to express anger. Well, she's only five. That was not the case. And so, you were so crafty for so long in figuring out some way of shutting anger down. Now, I'm here to tell you, I'm not five anymore. I'm in a different situation. And I'm going to ask you for some moments to kind of step back a little bit so I can practice expressing my anger in healthy ways, even to people I love. And over time, you might get a little worried, but we're kind of going to figure this out together. And that would be kind of an IFSbased intervention where we're learning to connect to our parts, understand their original function, have compassion, and in doing that they stop having such hold on us. And so this IFS perspective has really influenced how I think about development, how I help parents, but also some of my favorite interventions to actually teach parents to do with children is IFSbased and inspired. If we can help our kids learn to kind of recognize their parts early, that's one of the most adaptive things that leads to resilience later on.
So all the time in adulthood, we are faced with these things that we become curious about. Oh, is that one of the reasons I tend to act this way? Let's talk about attachment. Whenever I feel really upset, even maybe at my partner, I tend to pull away. I tend to pull away. I kind of push them away. If I start to learn, huh, if I do that at some point in my life, was that adaptive? might have been adaptive in my earliest years to have learned when I'm feeling big feelings, your best bet, it's not ideal, but your best bet is to pull away. That is your first moment of like immense power going forward in your adult life. We can't change things before we understand things. Like we always say that at good inside. We have to understand before we intervene. And understanding doesn't change things on its own, but it's a necessary first step. So you might reflect, hold on a second. This style that I even play out with my husband, with my kid, with someone at work, yeah, there's stuff going on in the present moment, but also it might be some type of reactivation or early pattern from the past. Then the next step, I think, is can I learn about it? The thing that stops us from learning about it is we feel like there's so much shame. I encourage people to kind of take this realization or curiosity and almost like put it on a shelf and look at it. Hm, that's interesting. H I wonder what else I could know about that. Hm, I think I'm going to learn about you. I think I'm going to take this book. There's so many books about attachment. There's so much we teach at Good Inside about something called reparing, about triggers, which is not at all about blaming your parents. Blaming to me is such a powerless move. That's not what we do. It's actually about understanding. why am I the way I am? And why do I do things that I don't want to do, but it just keeps happening? And if we can learn about that, then we can actually start to talk about it with someone. I might say to my partner, you know what I've learned about myself when I'm upset. Even though I kind of could really use some support in the past, before I even knew you, I never really got that support. So, one of the things I would do is kind of pull away. Do you ever feel like I do that to you? Maybe like I get really really snappy and even mean, which is not okay, and then later we realize I'd actually been having this really hard week at work. Your partner might look you and be like, "Yeah." which actually it can feel hard, but I promise you it can be this beautiful moment of a new type of connection when you're almost both looking at this thing in the shelf like, "Yeah, that's kind of true." And I think in the best partnerships, both people are understanding how my earliest attachments influence what I'm bringing today. and you learn about yourself and you learn about each other because it's amazing when a partner can start to see, oh, I think she's doing that pulling away thing. It doesn't mean it's my job to make this better. But actually having a little clarity, I might say to my partner in a hard moment, hey, look, the last week has been really hard. I feel like you've been really snippy and let's figure that out. I also know based on our conversations, there might be something hard and vulnerable you're going through. You can talk to me about that. This is not the same as early on. And I know it's going to feel hard cuz it's new. Why don't you take a moment because the snippiness and snapping at me, I know that's not the version of you you want to continue. And I know it's going to be a leap of faith for you to try something new. But I know we're both working on this. I'm going to ask you to do that. Why don't we find a time and you can tell me what's really going on? And this is where our earliest attachments give us information to empower ourselves. And in no way do they kind of put us in some type of prison.
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