Psych With Mike: Attachment in Adolescence

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[Music] welcome into the psych with mike library this is dr michael mahon i am here with

mr brett newcomb hello i have too many pens well you know freud has an explanation

for that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar that's what they say but sometimes not huh

how are you today i'm good so anything uh new and exciting going on in your life

not a thing yeah life is just bland is that well bland or just

stable good yeah yeah yeah so not blank life is good yeah life is good and you're wearing a pink shirt today for

anybody who is watching you on the youtubes i've always liked the color pink do you yeah

you don't feel uh conscientious in a pink shirt

no yeah well i always feel conscientious uh conspicuous is it oh well well can't

you i mean yeah conspicuous yes or or uh

uh what would what would you call it if you were were worried about what other people thought not conscientious

well yeah okay anyway it doesn't matter all right so uh good segue though

yes because we we're going to talk about um

attachment i would say that's because i'm a professional exactly uh you know

that the foundation of what i believe in

psychotherapy is emotional regulation i believe that that emotional regulation

is the result of how you are how you internalize the external objects

so you're the quality of the relationship with the primary caregiver when the child is young

and we talk a lot about how childhood trauma and this emotional regulation

developmental process can cause issues when the child is developing one

of the things that we've never talked about and i found an article about it and then i thought oh yeah we definitely should talk about this

is how does this affect the developmental process during adolescence

and i know that you were talking about this morning that

when you were young you felt like that

the movers and shakers of the peer group that

you were associated with didn't really give you a lot of positive

feedback no uh if that's what you heard i didn't say it clearly okay

i grew up in a large suburban high school yeah when i got to high school and adolescence

that was very cast organized i grew up in a southern town where

your social standing could be measured by how far away from the railroad tracks you lived the closer that you lived to

the railroad tracks the poorer and less socially acceptable your family was

but when they put us in high school they lumped us all together so people had to have identifiers we had groups that we

belong to we had letterman jackets for band and for athletics and debate team

and and what have you to find little sub categories and clicks and so on

i was acutely aware of how all that played out when i was in high school because i read all the time

and i had a curiosity about how does this work and what i was telling you is that by

definition i was relegated to the lower socioeconomic

community because of where i lived what my father did for a living how much money we had those kind of things

but intellectually i was put in accelerated classes so i was mixed in with

kids from the upper social spectrum who who tended to get put in those accelerated classes

and i was commenting that it used to frustrate the heck out of me because sometimes i would tell a joke

that i thought was funny and they would all sneer about how low class i was and

how horrible it was that i told that joke and it wasn't couth and you know nobody would laugh and

everybody act like they smelled something bad and then later over the course of the next day or two i would hear various

ones of those individuals tell that joke and have it laughed at as if it was

hysterical because they were telling it within their own social subgroup

so there was no cross-boundary there that had to be acknowledged but you

have said many times that you didn't feel as though the quality of the emotional

relationship that you had with your primary caregivers growing up was positive

yeah and did you feel as though that impacted you

during adolescence when you were in junior high school or high school i don't know that i thought about

it that until years later uh when i was in junior high in high school

what i and that's probably fair i don't know that anybody does that that anybody i

mean i don't i was obviously not consciously aware of the quality of the

relationship that i had with my primary caregivers and the effect that that had in high school i know that during high

school i felt profoundly like

the things that i knew from my family of origin didn't make any sense

in the context of things that i was learning in high school so i grew up

in a violent alcoholic family one of the rules of the alcoholic family is you never talk

outside of home about home you don't talk about what happened at home last

night you don't talk about the way your father behaves or your mother behaves or any of that stuff you just don't say anything about it

so because i read all the time i learned i remember vividly in the third grade

that you could read and go away somewhere and so i could read a story

about something in ancient history or something in another country and transport myself to that place and

be caught up in that book and not be in the environment that i was in so i read

voraciously most nights i read a book in overnight just read all night

a lot of nights and uh would try to incorporate within my personality

presentation traits uh that i read in the books that the hero had

uh dialect dialogue information whatever

so i consciously created an identity a public persona for

being at school that was different from the person that i was at home

so do you do you know

did you know then have you thought about it in retrospect and do

you know now how you were able to come to that that realization for yourself where you

actually would read the books and then select specific personality traits

i think that's pretty unusual i don't know i only have my own experience right well

what i know is there was a a boy that went to it's almost like you re-parented yourself by reading the

books yeah yeah yeah yeah i think that's pretty unique i learned it from somebody else

there was a boy in the third grade that was bullied by everybody including myself

trying to fit in trying to socialize with that group of aggressive nine-year-old boys

and i noticed this kid would go out at recess and climb to the top of the jungle gym we had an old-fashioned

jungle gym in the playground and sit up there at recess and read a book and he would be out of reach of

everybody most of the boys would go off and play ball or tag or what have you and the girls would go off in little

groups and do whatever they did i kept watching him and so one day i asked him i said what are you doing and

he said i'm reading and i said why and he said because i'm not here

so i thought oh that's interesting and so then i got a couple books and read them and

started to realize i didn't have to be there either i could do it at home i mean my father could be in a drunken rage and breaking furniture and knocking

people around i could sit in my bedroom and read a book and not be afraid so so the article that i sent

is actually a science-based article and it talks about the attachment with the primary caregiver

the quality of that attachment and that's you know all goes into john bolby and mary ainsworth's

attachment theory so you have secure you have the ambivalent and then the resistant attachments and then the

disorganized we don't really look at disorganized much because that's pretty pathologic so the insecure attachments

are the ambivalent and then the resistant and then how that plays out during

adolescence but we know now that these attachments and specifically trauma

has a real biological impact on the development

of the brain physiological development and yet i think you and i both would say

that our histories with our families of origin were difficult traumatic

and yet i think we turned out pretty good so

clearly there are ways that you can compensate for that but then there are

some people who really struggle with that and then they get to adolescence and i just i i just weep

for the individuals that were like you and me that didn't find

some way of being able to transcend that so my father was married to

married five different times and in the course of my early childhood

regularly i mean when i was nine years old i came home and they'd all moved away yeah i mean the house was empty i

mean you tell that story and and and i know you to be a person who doesn't

tend towards a hyperbole no that's an absolute literal story i know and and and i just think of a nine-year-old

coming home from school and the house being empty and not knowing where in the world everybody went yeah i

thought we've been robbed it's just that's that's i i don't even know how to wrap my head around that well so but

that wasn't the point of i don't know what to say um

i want to say that i don't know who can't identify especially in infancy

who was the object in object relations theory

who provided the consistent nurturing presence in my life what i do know is that as i grew up

there were teachers and scout masters and coaches who

played significant periods of support

that gave me positive reinforcement and a sense of security about capacity yeah

about intelligence about performance about courage whatever and the books that i read

gave me an understanding for how to manipulate the environment at

home and differently manipulate the environment in school so that i felt more safe

and more capable of moving through

the social hierarchy one of my absolute expectations in high school because of

where i lived and the circumstances of small southern town was that i would get a college education

to be able to get a job that would pay me enough money to live in a different social custom level

uh so that's what i did i mean i knew i had to otherwise my my destiny uh was the

script that was written for me by generations of my family none of whom had ever gone to school right and and no one in my family ever

went to school and i and and i hear very profoundly what you're saying about there were teachers there were coaches

there were other persons adult persons in the environment that provided you with an example that

you could use in place of that external object you know i i

really felt like i was was bumbling through you know grade school and junior high

school and then uh you know went to high school and started playing football mostly because

i was trying to get my dad's attention yeah but every year that i played and i

tell people all the time the only thing that stopped me from being able to

play professional football is a general basic lack of coordination

i was i am not what you would consider an athlete but i

played every year and i worked hard and every year that i played football at the

end of the year i got the most improved player award which is what you give to

the guy right who who is not going to get it but and i was willing to do anything that a

coach asked me and and they and i won these awards and i really genuinely

attribute that to profoundly changing my conceptualization

of myself because i wasn't getting that anywhere else and i don't know what would have

happened to me if i hadn't done that so i i'm thinking in particular and it's just it's a good

time to have this conversation because a lot of conversations out right now about teachers yeah and the role that teachers

play in society i had several teachers in high school in particular

that reached out to me and said you have these abilities you have to learn how to

navigate it so that you can get something out of it one of whom was the school librarian

and i became a volunteer library assistant and became the president of the arkansas junior librarians

association through her support and auspices which means nothing

to anybody now but it meant a lot to me then mm-hmm uh 50 years after i graduated my high

school i went to a high school reunion first time i'd gone back 50 years later so i'm having dinner with

some friends and we were talking about school and i said well mrs carpenter elaine carpenter mrs carpenter was such

a significant person in my life i wish i had been able to tell her that and somebody said well you still can't i

said what do you mean i thought she was dead no she's not dead so i called her mm-hmm and i said i want

to tell you you steered my life into the survival lane

and you helped me become a teacher and you have helped me reach other kids and

i want you to know that 50 years after you worked with me your lessons are still echoing into generations of kids

you've never met five years later i heard from one of her

sons she had died and he said i just want to let you know my mother

uh became senile to the end of her life toward the end of her life there were very few memories that she could hold

and she held the memory of your phone call wow and it she repeated it to me every day

the last few weeks of her life about how important that phone call was and what it meant to her

that you had called her and you told her she was that seminal in your life yeah

and that's what i want to say is if you have a teacher who has touched

your life who has reached you at whatever level of education let them know

tell them because they do an incredible service to all of us and

they need more respect so let's take our break and when we come back i'm going to tell you my story all right

oh because i was your teacher yes [Laughter] hey everybody dr michael mahon here from

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it's friday it's psych with mike okay we're back so you know

uh i hadn't originally thought about this in the context of the current

societal uh zeitgeist but you're you're absolutely right this is a great time to

and this wasn't why i had originally thought about this topic but you but this is a great great segue or great

avenue to go down you know my son is a teacher my son is a teacher in the

school that you started your teaching career yeah which is amazing to me

but uh so i i have a great and respect for teachers and i i don't know why

while you were telling this story this came to me i do not remember i remember the name of

the all the names of every football coach i ever had i do not remember the name of a single teacher save two

when i was living in granite city illinois going to washington elementary school

which doesn't exist anymore there were two teachers there that i actually remember mr dixon and mr

swabota i know these are real people because downstairs in my workshop i actually

have a ruler that has swaboda written on the back of

it that was a ruler that he gave me when i was in fourth or fifth grade and

the reason why these names stay with me is because we were having a

discussion in a class about

origins and mr dixon had who taught social studies was talking

about you know origins and he was asking kids in the class

what is your family origin and he got to me and i

said i've known jim beam i said you know i don't think i have an origin and he said

your last name is mahan and i said yeah he said that's irish and that was the first

time that anybody had ever given me any kind of a compass

to be able to think about in terms of who i was

and and and that changed my foundational perception of

myself finally i could say oh my family comes from ireland i'd never known that no one in my family ever

talked about such things yeah so then mr swabota taught math

but i would go to summer school every year not because i had to i made great grades

but because i didn't have anything else to do so back if i walked to school every day

which is what we did back then they would let me go to school and so over the summer i would just walk

to school because i didn't have anything else to do and i would hang out there and in mr swabo's class we didn't have

air conditioning and so we would open all of the windows and turn on these gigantic fans and sit on

the floor and turn out all of the lights and during summer school mr swabota

would read to us the hardy boys and nancy drew mysteries

and i would go every day just to be able to go

and sit on the floor and have him read to us that's one of the more important things that parents can do yeah

and and my kids will tell you to this day that there was not a single day that

went by in either one of their lives that they can remember from the time that they were born until they started

school when i did not read to them that's really important and i was i i

these memories that that that i i hadn't thought about these things until you were telling me this and you're

absolutely right those were seminal things that's the impact of teachers and

so whatever people think about teachers right now in our society and i can't even imagine a more difficult time to be

a teacher and i think about this with my son every day i mean if if somebody walked into a school that my

son were teaching at with a gun i i don't know what i would do well it's not that's not the only issue

you also have the issues about he's a social science teacher does he use critical race theory uh what does he

teach about the transgendered and other sexual orientations or realities what does he

teach about what's going on in our society because there's rage in the community about how what

should be taught and how it should be taught and how pathetic teachers are and how they're all on some kind of liberal

agenda and change the world and destroy christianity and so on i i think it's a

horrible time to be a teacher but i would also say thank god for the teachers absolutely

who were seminal in my life i mean yeah i i don't even know

and thank god for the opportunity to tell elaine carpenter what yeah it meant to me well i was just thinking you know i

i don't think i could find these gentlemen i i may try and and see if i can

can can discover uh uh but you know just the the fact that this is

all coming back to me is making me recognize that you are absolutely right

in those fam when those family of origins are not good where are you getting somewhere to go

yeah and and thank god that you and i had teachers in

our lives let's also make the point coaches our teachers yeah and if you had coaches who encouraged you and got more

out of you than you would normally give that needs to be acknowledged and validated yeah yeah yeah yeah mr

jennings and mr robbie do that my coaches were debate coaches yes i know because you're so much more intellectual

than i am uh more verbally verbally astute i think yeah yeah and you know what but

i mean we're obviously i'm making light of that and i shouldn't because there's no question that choir debate

those kinds of pursuits are just as legitimate as playing football

or soccer or baseball amen yeah but uh

okay so i i teach college i

i call myself a professor well the college calls me a professor um i don't think of myself as a teacher i

don't feel did you feel like that teaching college was the same as teaching high school

teaching is teaching the content

is what you present but what you do is make connections with your students

and open windows for them maybe i feel like it's different because i feel like by

the time they get to me in college most of that

formulative development has already taken place i don't feel like i'm probably making the

same kind of impact because

if you're the second third or fourth grade you have a very limited range of access

to world experiences the older you get if you're in the 10th 11th and 12th grade and that's same

thing with doing counseling with adolescents they can find other

reference points to pay attention to and other things to invest themselves in than you and your opinion of them and by

the time they're in graduate school that's even a broader challenge yeah so

you have the opportunity you present your material you're committed to knowing what you know and you're offering that to the people

that say i want to know what you know but it's still the dance of relationship

and the effort to open windows in their mind

but i think that both of us then are saying that

these individuals who are spending time with our children

in these classrooms from first grade until high school

are the people who have the ability to potentially correct

damage that may be being done to those individuals in their families of origin yes yeah absolutely and that any teacher

who might be hearing this and and hopefully this will be disseminated broadly and other and lots of teachers

will hear it any teacher that's hearing this do not take that for granted don't

undersell the potential impact of that because you have two people who had horrible family

of origin stories who are sitting here saying that we attribute our ability to

have transcended that to the teachers that we knew in our lives yeah

and and that's i i just can't imagine something that is more profound than

that i wish more people saw it that way so

do you think that that's what caused you to want to be a teacher absolutely oh okay

i don't think i ever knew that yeah and not that one no no yeah yeah yeah two or three other

teachers did the debate coach but i'm saying teacher you had a much more

profound understanding that these teachers had given you something that you didn't get

from your family of origin then i did until i was much older

i'll have to accept your analysis there well but i'm saying because it drove you to want to be a teacher absolutely yeah

and and i'll tell you i love teaching high school as much the day i quit teaching high school 20

years down the road as i did the day i started yeah but i don't think i would teach high school today yeah

yeah it's changed too much it's changed too much and and uh it's just amazing to me

there's too many agendas too many uh righteously indignant people and people

managing headphones hedge funds are just making out like

robber barons and we can't pay teachers a living wage that's unbelievable it's you know we we

our culture doesn't value it no we've we need to have a come to jesus meeting

about what we think the priorities are in life but that's not

a topic for this show for today all right hopefully uh people enjoyed that and if you are a teacher and you

have a perspective that you would like to share with us we would certainly be open to that you can get us

psych with mike.com as always the music that appears in psych with mike is written and performed by mr benjamin the

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