Aug 5, 2022
Emotional regulation is a necessary skill for secure attachment.
In other words, people who are a "hot mess" have difficulty feeling
secure about themselves or having good relationships with
others.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/head-games/202206/how-become-more-secure-person
Transcript:
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with mike
welcome to the site with mike library this is dr michael mohan i'm
here with mr brett newcomb and intern michael
hello hello how are you gentlemen doing doing well i i asked if we
were ready and the response i got did not seem
overly enthusiastic ho-hum is a response it is a response sometimes
no news is good news uh that's
yeah that's what they say no news is good news so uh
this is uh a subject that i find compelling i'm not sure the rest
of the room finds
it compelling is that fair to say interesting uh i i don't know how
compelling it
needs to be to to talk about it uh what what are you talking
about
what are we talking about uh my i told you this morning when you
got
here that i did something that i never do which is i actually
listened to an
episode of psych with mike and i listened to the episode that
i
posted today which is friday the 8th of july for anybody keeping
track at home
and in that show we had michelle stieg here who you had
brought
with you a couple of weeks ago and uh we were talking about
theoretical orientation and i was saying that you
know my theoretical orientation comes from the psychodynamic
perspective and
heinz kohut and the development of
parenting models which leads to attachment and i have talked about
piaget's original stage of
development which is trust versus mistrust and it's just so
uh that is so much the foundation of how i understand human
psychology that when i
think about doing therapy and i think about people who have had
challenges in their sense
of security and in their attachment styles the question becomes as
an adult
what can you do about that let's assume that this underlying
theory of psychology that i subscribe to is cogent that it makes
sense that it's
accurate and you have struggles with those early
years in those early relationships as a lot of us have brett you
and i know that we talk about that all the time we don't
know as much about michael's relationship with his primary
caregivers as an infant but we know that you and i
really struggled with that and so as adults we've had to learn
compensatory
behaviors or whatever compensatory abilities to be able to be
in attached relationships and to feel more secure and so how do you
give that
to somebody in therapy that's that's really kind of my my
focus
so you are questioning whether or not
atypical if there is such a thing client coming in for the first
time that you don't know
whatever their presenting uh issue or reason for being there is is
in all likelihood suffering from some
kind of attachment disorder suffered from childhood
distress or trauma is that is that what your postulate
i think i would agree with that that that that's an accurate
encapsulation yeah and capitulization of what's going on in therapy
yeah and i
think a lot of therapy if it's successful involves
re-parenting
that wounded inner child whether that's the individual learns how
to reparent
themselves or whether you model and demonstrate for them how to
re-parent themselves i think if the
therapy is beneficial and successful it will involve re-parenting
some of
those scripts that are wounded in broken scripts that we carry
around inside ourselves yeah i remember when i was in
graduate school i don't know if you knew this at the time but
uh people talk about inner child and and back in the uh in the mid
90s when i was
actually in grad school uh it was a buzz it was like absolutely and
i used to say all the time the only
thing that i want from my inner child is his skittles and then i'm
going to kick his ass
you know and because i didn't want to hear that kind of language it
felt
i mean i it felt offensive to me and what i realized later was not
because that's not true
or accurate but because i wasn't ready you were too resisting yeah
yeah i
was resisting it big time um and so i think that that that that
we
look at things like internal family systems right where when we
ignore or suppress those inner children or
whatever parts of us that they are they really show up in other
places in our life yeah and in ways that we didn't
necessarily absolutely yeah absolutely i think that's the central
premise of ifs yeah yeah
and listen to your parts and be aware of their existence and i
don't know if you've seen the episodes that we've done
with michelle but she is an ifs therapist and so that was exactly
the
conversation that we were having and you know brett and i have
always been i think brett's more open to it now i'm
still less open to it the idea of ifs which i don't for me it's a
it's a
descriptor you have to find a language that you and your client can
share yeah so one of the challenges of being a
therapist is to listen to the language that the client uses so that
you can
do appropriate feedback and and reflective listening in a way that
demonstrates that you hear
them accurately uh so if i have a client who's a truck driver
and i can do it appropriately i try to use driving analogies as
often as i can because it's like what you experience if
i have a client's computer programmer i'll use computer examples
whatever i can do if i can do it if i
can't do it then i say you have to educate me i don't know teach me
your language but i listen and
some of it is neuro-linguistic programming you hear the things they
say
and you can determine the way they experience the world if they do
it visually if they do it orally if they do
it tactically and that helps you then speak in the rhythm that they
can hear so i think
that's a critical component i think ifs also offers that language
too because children talk about
this idea that oh there's a part of me that got angry and so it's
really easy to latch on to that apart oh let's talk
about this part and not take ownership of the whole thing that was
just a part a minute and it reminds me of um uh you
talk about it's just another frame or another language or another
structure on top of some very good very old ideas it
reminds me of you know gestalt's uh empty chair technique where
we
set somebody down and we say what would you say to yourself but now
instead of talking to your whole self maybe you're just talking to
one part of yourself
absolutely and if you've ever had an opportunity to experience that
literally making them move from one
chair to the other yeah is an essential component of that technique
they they sit in one chair and
they say what their mother said then they sit in their chair and
say what they would say right if their mother
could hear them if you're if you're saying you want to your mother
even if she's dead
and she could hear you and understand you what would you say give
yourself permission say it out loud then get back
in the chair and so the you facilitate that conversation but they
do all the work yeah they have all the conversation
they generate all the concepts but let's not gloss over the
technique it's super
super important that they change chairs oh absolutely because
psychologically they change they shift the viewpoint and
and you don't have to understand why that happens as a therapist
but you got to understand to try and ask them to
remain in the same chair and have that dualistic kind of
message going on in their brain is extremely difficult which one
you can't do therapy with yourself you need another what what you
hate
you can't do therapy with yourself and therein lies the rub
[Laughter]
well even the article talks about this idea of when you're making
interpersonal changes making peace with the past
they quote one participant is saying that she was able to
observe
something that happened in her past and become aware of it so we're
talking about how do we inch towards security
and how do we how do we progress towards that idea of the secure
attachments and awareness i think is what we're
really touching on being critically aware of all of these things
that got you to the place that you are
and then being able to critically ask yourself what do i like what
don't i like what do i just have to live with
and because they said it doesn't make it so correct uh i was told
you're too
so okay also the article the article talks about in the process of
doing that this individual was able
to reframe her understanding and compassion for her mother who
had
been pretty traumatizing for reasons that she now had a better uh
grasp on
which helped her reframe the dance between she and her mother
and you know that i'm like in a real young phase right now i'm
reading all of
young stuff and everything and so that's kind of my where my focus
is and one of the things
that i am really starting to realize
and i'm going to go off track here because i'm building a clock uh
you know you talk about all the time
um whose perspective is it that you can't uh uh
kernberg's idea that you can't really address your
whatever they are bipolar or narcissistic or whatever personality
issues until in your 50s or later late
40s early 50s and i am so in that vein right now because i've been
doing all of
this study with jung and one of the things that i'm recognizing is
this idea
of trying to embrace the shadow and so you know this and michael
you probably may or may not know this but i'm blind
in my left eye and it doesn't always track with my right eye when i
tell
people this the first time most people say oh i never knew that i
never and and it's amazing to me how little other
people but people don't really pay attention to their environment
and and so it's amazing to me how much people will say
oh i never knew that because it's been such a my retina detached
when i was in high
school playing football it was the end of my football career and if
i tell people this it makes me
seem very sympathetic to most people right to me it's something
that is
embarrassing and shameful and i've always tried to hide it so it's
been a part of my shadow and so i've really
been trying to work on embracing that but that to me that's what
young's
so what jung talks about in the shadow and the persona and the self
is really
an aspect of ifs sure yeah and and i know i only just now
made that comparison because we've been talking to michelle and
there's nothing new under this
there's nothing new under the sun yeah it's amazing but so when
we're talking about the inner
child what seems to me to be the clinical
focus would be how do i help you brett or you michael
identify what are those pieces of your wounded
child that you live with or try and hide and how can i help you to
embrace that
not so that you can resolve the trauma but so that you can live
with it without
fear insecurity or shame so i think one of the ways that a
therapist does that is to begin with
what carl rogers called unconditional positive regard i
want to say to you that i hear what you are saying and i
honor you for surviving whatever your experience was nothing
shameful or
disgusting or horrible or evil or wicked in what you did to
survive
however you managed it you got here how you got here today is
not on you that's on others and the adults in your life in
particular how you leave here is on you and what i can
offer you is the the promise that if we do this work properly you
will leave here
with more power and more control than you've ever had yeah at
hearing the voice from among those voices inside you that you want
to hear that you need to hear
so if you will talk to me and you will trust the process what
you'll see is that i absolutely
accept and honor who you are and how you got here especially those
that have had
severe and chronic abuse experiences in right life who were
shamed
and threatened and punished because of that to say to them you
don't have to be in
touch with that part of that any longer than you want to you don't
need it anymore to survive you survived to this
point let's talk about what you need to go out of here and be able
not necessarily to get rid of that but to
put it back in the bag and keep it so that you can take it out if
you want to so let's go to our break and then when
we come back i really like the language that you're using here and
so i want to ask you a question about that but let's
go to our break and i'll do that on the other side all right hey
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always if
it's friday it's psych with mike okay we're back and so i really
like
that language that you're using and what i'm wanting to to know the
the
to try and crystallize this for me is how do you initially
approach that shame that the client
feels how do you do that in a way that doesn't get them to turtle
up and
and want to defend themselves so one of the things that
occurs and do you understand what i'm saying yeah okay i think yeah
one thing that
occurs is i get angry that some adult has abused a child i am
angry
a child that survived that kind of abuse is hypersensitive to my
anger
so i want to identify it and say i am angry but i'm not angry with
you i'm not
angry at whatever you had to do to survive i have no antagonism
towards that at all wow okay okay this is what
this is exactly where i wanted to go yeah yeah because i and i
didn't know that it was but yeah this is exactly right so you're
counter transference
is to be angry shutting off their their radar though but their
transference then
is to experience that anger as similar to similarly
traumatizing
to their original experience it interferes with the connection yeah
and the and the uh
strengthening of that individual mm-hmm so what they have to
experience from me and i don't know if you pay close enough
attention but my when when i drop into therapy mode that way my
voice changes my delivery changes it's more soothing
yeah i've never noticed that uh then when i'm just casually in
conversation uh that's because you've never been in
therapy with me yes i've noticed that a million different i could i
could identify a million different times when
i knew brett just dropped into the he's doing it oh he's doing it
yeah and i'm sure if i called your wife she would be
able to correct it robin williams and matt damon spent an entire
movie getting to this point that
we're getting to here where it's not your fault it's a very
powerful message
absolutely it's it's an incredibly powerful message and necessary
but okay so so let me let me go back to this and
so so the the the counter transference is you would be angry and
just counter
transference is the therapist projected onto you and then the the
transference is the client's experience of the
therapist and therapy and and so uh well the client is constantly
going to try to
manipulate me into the traditional response that they have received
yeah which is you have to
they're going to say today they say are you going to give me
homework i said well do you need
homework do you want homework yeah i think so well all right here's
some homework the next week thinking oh
you're going to be really mad yeah i didn't do my homework well why
am i going to measure i didn't do my homework okay so what
no i didn't want i wasn't going to give you homework to begin with
yeah what grade yeah exactly but but i really want to go back
failure you loser so so the
transference is the counter transference is that you get angry
because the child's been abused the transference is
this is re-traumatizing the same way so you're saying okay so i say
to them
uh i'm not angry at you i'm angry that the situation occurred
do you ever try and not be angry i don't try to not be angry if i'm
angry
i'm angry what i try to do is is clarified right you are picking up
accurately what you're getting
but let me clarify it's not you that i'm angry with but this is the
point that i think is so
important for therapists generally and for new therapists the goal
isn't for you to not have
emotions right you're not the blank mirror that beginners are told
they need to be
exactly uh you are a real person with real feelings and the client
picks up on all that so you have to be able to say
i'm sad and cry when you hear something sad or laugh when
something's funny to you
and then say i didn't mean to offend you it just struck me as funny
uh
how do we work past right but you have to be aware enough of your
own internal processes i had a couple come see me one
time a black man a white woman came from marital counseling first
session i'm talking to him about coming for marriage
counseling and i said i really was that clarence thomas
want to communicate to you that i think i can hear you and i
want
to hear if you have any concerns about my ability to hear you and
the
black man looked at his wife they looked at me and he said one of
the troubles that we are having
has to do with sex and i fantasize all the time about having sex
with white women
are you too white to hear that which i thought was a brilliant
question
and one he needed to have answered if i was going to be able to
help him if i was going to be able to sit in a room with him if i'm
sitting there judging
him and and condemning him for his fantasies right i can't help him
right
and i know that and he knows that so he was able to ask can you
listen but i think here and and i'm glad that that
the client was able to do that but i think the point that you made
about therapists in in their training are
conditioned to believe they're supposed to be blank slate which is
that is an
unachievable goal it's impossible you have to be a human person in
humane but
you have to be a human person capable of monitoring their own
processes well enough to know when it's not your i'm
sitting here i'm angry because you're telling me this story of
abuse but i'm not angry at you
because this happened to a child so that's the point of the
conversation about modeling
and re-parenting because they experience in their most vulnerable
and anxious moments
modeling of appropriate responsiveness not what they experienced in
their childhood yeah and so then you can
process that and discuss what did that feel like what just happened
do you are you aware of that can we can do what are
your reactions to it what's your level of awareness to it because
in doing that we're
re-parenting their script and one of the things that i will
point
out now because this is sailing or coming into my consciousness is
i have had many clients
especially when i was younger because now i'm pretty old but when i
was younger i had many clients who were much
older than me that were able to experiencing experience me
as a caring nurturing parent so you don't have to necessarily think
oh
i'm 32 how am i going to do this for a 50 year old man you can do
it because
it's not yours to do it's the client's experience that matters and
the client
can have that experience i don't know if i fully agree with that
you don't i i think i do but i'm mindful of the fact
that for years what i would tell my students in counseling program
younger students especially is i don't care what
skills you learn you need some aging because if i walk into your
office with
marital issues and i look at you and you're 27 and i'm 70.
i'm not going to talk to you i'm not going to take that risk
because i can't imagine that you can understand my
circumstances so i don't know how that changes but there's a there
is a presentation that they have
to learn how to make yeah that says to me okay there's something
here that maybe i can take this risk right there's
something here that maybe i'm willing to float this out here right
but initially my impressions
are you're too young to know what you're talking about have you
ever had any children and been a parent
and i think that this goes back to the idea of there are different
therapists for different people absolutely and so
if the 70 year old man comes in and can't put themselves in that
position then that's not a good therapy experience for
them and they should find somebody else but what i have experienced
is that you
can present yourself as timeless once you learn how to do if you
get the
opportunity yeah yeah but but the client has to buy into it right
and if the client doesn't then no then it's not
going to work but i have had men who were twice my age yeah who i
know experienced me as a nurturing
parent and so that can happen as long as the therapist is good at
their job and
doing things right and the client is able to open themselves up to
it i think another part of your point there is also
you were speaking about getting angry with the not angry at the
client i'm
angry with the client for the client or the client that's the
language that i think i want
to pick on maybe a little bit because your job as a as a therapist
is not to
feel the emotion for the client oh absolutely i have to take
clearly say this is mine it's coming out of me and
my friend at the whole counter transfer message but it's not at
you
it's at however you were wounded and the fact that any child is
wounded that way
and that comes from me i take ownership of it and you don't need to
feel it and
we need to have this is not one-time trial learning we will repeat
this conversation a number of times before
you can internalize it and and the clarification the clarification
though that i would make is that
we are not so counter transference i guess if technically if it's
counter transparency could be the therapist's
own stuff but when you're doing therapy you are going to experience
emotions as
a therapist that are being projected by the client so you're not
feeling it
for them you're feeling it with them and they may not have the
language to be
able to identify like the client may be experiencing shame over
that trauma
event and you may be experiencing anger and so it's important for
the therapist to help them be able to identify that
language and then once you do that then the client says you know
what i i'm pretty angry about that yeah and i
didn't know that and so it's important for the therapist to be able
to help the client develop
language around their own emotional regulation michael's right you
have to make the distinction yeah
these are not your feelings or my reflection of your feelings these
are mine and they're not really about you at all
they're about the circumstances you're describing and that's a it's
hard and i think there's a consent
there too but your client has to be willing to feel that with you
and maybe they don't feel that at all
nudge it repeatedly right if they keep coming back right right
right they will and that's the other piece that shocks
me about what doesn't necessarily shock me about security but that
i find interesting about becoming more secure
somebody very close to me is going through a therapy process right
now and they have had an [ __ ] an abusive
an emotionally abusive mother for almost all of their lives um then
they're also gay and they came out with this
they came back to me one day and said i said well how did therapy
go and they said i didn't realize that not
everybody's parents called them a [ __ ] and i said
that's correct
that is an emotionally abusive situation and that hurts um
and he said i got a lot out of this therapy session because
suddenly i realized that that wasn't
normal and that i didn't like that i said okay very good right and
so that
i i really felt that there's a marked difference in this person and
how they see themselves and
how they accept themselves and their sexual identity after that
conversation
right good and and and so wow you know i think that that when it
works it's beautiful
it's powerful you can see it yeah you know we started this out
talking about the idea of the inner child and the
relationship of that to jung's theory of the the shadow and you
know
so i think that there is a part of therapy that is directed
towards helping people embrace the shadow i think that's how you
truly are able to establish security as an
adult is to be able to embrace those parts of yourself that you
have felt either shame or
you know tried to hide i think that that is the healthy way to be
able to do that but you know when you're talking about
this is he going to embrace the idea that his
mother called him a [ __ ] for all of his life maybe not
and so he it it's about acceptance i got to find a way to
accept that so do you think that he found that or is he still
looking for
that i think he has accepted that that is his reality yeah and that
that was and
that's very liberating and i think he always accepted that that was
what happened right he didn't deny that as as
a reality it was more the understanding that that wasn't the norm
yeah that that when that
happens to other people they also get angry and it is okay to feel
that anger right he is
justified in that anger and it doesn't mean so maybe that's what
he's working to accept is the anger that he yeah
because he was always in denial about that yes yeah well he
wouldn't he wasn't allowed to feel that feeling because on
top of on top of the hate that he gets from the idea of the sexual
identity there are
other ideas of masculinity underneath that and a less than man
who
is gay right if i show emotion if i express this idea well that
makes me
more feminine and that leans into this idea of being this thing
that my parents
dislikes or my parents is picking on so many so many shame-based
messages yes
it's a shame yeah so i think that's a good point to jump
off the train um hopefully this was beneficial for people as always
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