Hi everybody. This is Kevin O'Donoghue Licensed Mental Health Counselor, and I'm Niseema Dyan Diemer Licensed Massage Therapist and Trauma Specialist and this is The Positive Mind where we bring you some ideas, concepts, and guests to help you lead a more positively minded life. So here's the question: how important
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:00:47
Is childhood to your adult self? Did your childhood affect how you are in life today? You know, how about if you're married, do you look at your partner sometimes and think, "Oh, that's definitely from when she was a child or when he was from a child," you know, we can often see it in our partners that yes, they were very much affected before they even met me. And that has affected how they are in our relationship and how they are in our family and everything else. And we therapists and counselors know that we often try to help you connect the dots between the present and the past, often that will help you see that very much, your childhood has affected your life.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:01:29
And we want to parse out in what ways has it affected your life in a positive way? And in what ways has it affected your life in a negative way? Let's say you're the product of a divorce, or you've seen violence in your home, or your refrigerator was empty when you were a kid. Do you think that might've affected how you are as an adult? Well, our guest today is someone who has studied very much what it was like to be a one-year-old and how that might've affected how they are as grownups. Yes one-year-old. You could be the person grown up with your one-year old sense of commitment and connection to people.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:02:10
Our guest is Bethany Saltman, author of one of the top science books of 2020 called "Strange Situation: A Mother's Journey into The Science of Attachment." She's going to talk to us about this very famous psychology experiment called "the strange situation" experiment, and talk to us about something called attachment style and how your attachment style might be affecting how you are as a grownup. Welcome to The Positive Mind.
Bethany Saltman
00:02:42
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:02:44
So does it matter how you were raised as an infant and as a child?
Bethany Saltman
00:02:50
Absolutely. It depends on what you are looking at. However, in your intro, you mentioned things like violence, food in the fridge, and these things are going to affect us in different ways. What I looked at was a very specific kind of relational dynamic that affects us throughout our lives and that's attachment. And so certainly violence is going to traumatize most people in a certain way that will be affected by attachment as will hunger. However, attachment is something that is so specific to the adult's inner workings of their own attachment system, that things like poverty really don't have anything to do with it.
Bethany Saltman
00:03:35
So, you know, if you're under certain kinds of stress, you are at a higher risk for an insecure attachment, but attachment actually doesn't have anything to do with the so-called type of family you grow up in.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:03:48
So attachment is basically how a child feels attached to their primary caretaker.
Bethany Saltman
00:03:56
Exactly. So attachment and the classical literature calls it "attachment patterns." And I make that distinction between patterns and styles, because a lot of people take quizzes and things online to find out what their attachment quote "style" is. And that's very different from the science that I studied, which is really administered in a clinical or in a laboratory setting. So the strange situation is a procedure that takes place in a lab that you have to be very well-trained to begin to even understand what you're looking at. And in adult attachment, we've got what's called the "adult attachment interview," which is an hour long interview that gets translated, or that gets transcribed verbatim, and then coded using very, very meticulous kinds of procedures.
Bethany Saltman
00:04:45
So it's very distinct from what might loosely be called attachment styles. Everybody says, "Hey, I'm avoidant, I'm preoccupied, right?" Maybe, but it'll look different if you're actually working with one of these expert experts. But in terms of what is attachment exactly simply put it's it's the way a child, the way a baby by the time they're one year old relates to their caregiver in times of stress. And that's really important to remember it's about stress. What happens when a child is under stress, do they, or do they not experience their caregiver as a secure base, does the caregiver bring the child back to their own level of homeostasis Regardless of their temperament, some children are more activated, some children are more subdued.
Bethany Saltman
00:05:41
It doesn't matter wherever that child is before a stressful incident occurs and the parent is available. Can they use that parent as a secure base to soothe themselves? That's what attachment is looking at.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:05:58
And you can imagine how important this is, because if you're three, four, five months, six months, eight months a year, and your mother is there and you're under stress, and you do not feel soothed and secure what that must do to your nervous system and to your mind and your developing mind.
Bethany Saltman
00:06:15
Exactly. And to your sense of trust, right? Because you know, parents our parent's primary job is setting aside shelter and food, which really can be done by anybody. The primary caregiver is responsible for what's called "co-regulation." So what's going on inside of the parent's mind, heart, body sensations is really how they mirror back to the child. So if the baby is uncomfortable because their diaper is wet or they're hungry, and the caregiver can't respond in a way with an effect and with their own sensory experience, then the child feels like they're falling into an abyss, like, wait a minute, how come I feel so strongly?
Bethany Saltman
00:07:07
And my caregiver isn't giving that back in kind. And that isn't because the caregiver doesn't care or because the caregiver doesn't love the child, or because the caregiver is deficient, but they were probably not received with a kind of sensory output of experience in their own life. And so they haven't learned to relate to their own feelings. And this is what gets passed down again and again, through generation.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:07:35
So a parent might be insecurely attached themselves. And so when their baby needs their attention, their affection, their attunement, they might be attuned to their own problems. I'm busy paying the rent, or I'm busy worrying about this or worrying about my parents or remembering when I was hurt. And so you only have a wet diaper. Why should I pick you up for that? I'll do that later.
Bethany Saltman
00:07:56
Well, actually I would say that the parent who is insecurely attached, for instance, an avoidant parent may be thinking about their problems of paying the rent or of their own parents, but they're not actually relating to it. That's what an insecure attachment is. It's not relating to your own inner life. And so when the child is having an issue is experiencing upset, disturbance, dysregulation. They need to be able to be met in that and mirrored in that, and the insecure adult doesn't have access to their own internal experience.
Bethany Saltman
00:08:37
So they can't bring it as it were to the child.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:08:41
So that kind of brings to mind what you say later in the book. Dr. Burke Harris, when she was talking about a polluted well of water, and if you have a hundred people exposed to drinking from the well and 98 of them have diarrhea, you might want to go and check the water. You know, so it strikes me if you're having insecurely attached child or an insecurely attached parent, you might want to look at what's causing, or what caused, this insecurity or why is this nervous system is never achieving a sense of completion? And what do you call it stasis so, is that what is going on now that the research is going into looking at what is causing this insecurity, insecure attachments and how to help a greater number of the population?
Bethany Saltman
00:09:36
Well, since the fifties and sixties, that's what the attachment research has been looking at. So it's become much more fine tuned and much more connected to neuroscience. And, you know, as the field of psychology and neuroscience progress as does attachment theory, but that's always been the question. What is it that creates a certain kind of, first of all, is attachment a thing. Is it real? And as John Bowlby found, yes, it is. In fact real, it is something, it is a behavioral system like caretaking and fear, affiliation, sexuality.
Bethany Saltman
00:10:17
These are whole body mind behavioral systems that each one of us is born with. So that's the beginning. And then why does that exist? It exists to keep children safe and alive because it creates a bond between a child and the caregiver. And then what happens if that's not an optimal kind of bond, the effects are pretty profound. If you don't feel like someone has your back, or as I like to talk about it, if you're the apple of someone's eye and it doesn't have to be all the time, it doesn't have to be in some kind of like storybook Hallmark way.
Bethany Saltman
00:10:58
It's very human. This is, if you think about human beings, 65% of us are considered securely attached, and that's a universal number. And if you think about the diversity of human experience, the number of families that don't have food in the fridge, the number of families that do experience a little bit of violence, the number of families whose parents are certainly not perfectly attuned, certainly not feeding their kids organic food, limiting screen time, you know, all the things wearing slings, getting their kids into classes and SAT prep and all the things that that so many of us in the West think are what make us good parents.
Bethany Saltman
00:11:41
It's a very humbling thing to think about. You don't have to be anything special to be securely attached or to raise a securely attached child. All you have to do is have some experience and some comfort with your own emotions, your own difficult feelings.
Niseema Dyan Diemer
00:12:02
I just feel like every parent out there has this huge pressure on them to not make the mistakes their parents did to raise a generation. It's a confusing time. It's all these things. And I really appreciate how you sort of normalize the experience and in this book, you share so much of your own experience. It really is a personal journey to understand, how to be the best parent. And you speak about how you were influenced by the attachment parenting movement and mindful parenting and how, for better or worse, it was the sort of jumping post to this discovery, this whole exploration on some level.
Bethany Saltman
00:12:43
Well, attachment parenting is something that I actually have a big problem with. So when I was younger and my daughter was just born, she's 14 now almost 15, actually. And I had learned about Dr. Sears and so-called attachment parenting I, like so many women, felt really ashamed of that because the way he talks about his version of attachment security, he says that it's natural to feel all of these things. It's natural to feel attuned. And I didn't feel attuned to my daughter. I felt resentful. I felt angry. I felt I was really struggling. And so his version of attachment has absolutely nothing to do with the science of attachment.
Bethany Saltman
00:13:29
He is actually a conservative Christian who has a very specific agenda about wanting women to stay in the home. And so this is very thinly veiled anti-feminist BS that I am on a mission to unravel for people because he has convinced a generation of parents that if they don't take care of their children in this very specific way, then their children won't be attached and nothing could be further from the truth. Attachment has absolutely nothing to do with slings where your kid sleeps. If you nurse, if you don't nurse, if you go to work, if you don't go to work, none of those things matter.
Bethany Saltman
00:14:14
What matters is how the parent feels about their own experience, and if they can metabolize their own sensations and actually show up in life for themselves and for their child, it's so much simpler than we think it is. So attachment parenting. Yes, it got me thinking about the word, but I quickly realized that attachment, per Mary Ainsworth, has nothing to do with Dr. Sears and is in conflict with it. Mindful parenting I don't really know exactly what that is. I am a longtime Zen practitioner, so I kind of brought my own version of mindfulness to this. And it turns out that there is a distinct correlation between one's attachment security and one's mindfulness.
Bethany Saltman
00:14:59
So the more secure we are in ourselves and our ego, in our trust of the world, the easier it is to be present moment to moment. And that of course creates more security generation after generation.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:15:14
What about oxytocin? I mean, I think most people would think, well, it's natural for a mother to bond with her child and be a secure base for her child or be attuned to her child that it might be natural. And the science is often that there's a flood of oxytocin that makes this possible, that this bonding is natural. Of course, there's the phenomenon of postpartum depression, right? Where a mother just doesn't feel anything for the child or worse, it just feels alienated, whatever. So I'm wondering like how could he say, there are certain requirements for attachment that clearly contradicts sometimes what women actually really experience, which might be that they don't want to bond with the chil, that it's not necessarily so natural for them to be attached.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:16:07
Can you talk a little bit about oxytocin or what I'm saying here with postpartum
Bethany Saltman
00:16:11
In terms of oxytocin I wouldn't see it as such a polarity. Either you're flooded with feel-good hormones and you feel totally bonded or you feel nothing, right. You know, we're human beings. Women are human beings. We have the spectrum of emotion, like other human beings, and the more securely attached we are, the more available all of those emotions are to us. I, for instance, struggled with feeling, not that I, I loved my baby deeply and dearly, but I didn't always feel super inspired to show up in the way that I thought I should. It turns out I'm totally securely attached. And so is she, so, you know, that I think is the real takeaway.
Bethany Saltman
00:16:55
And I went through this long journey of studying the science and putting myself in these situations where I was getting the feedback of the science to learn this about myself. The takeaway for me is that we're calling the whole conversation around secure/insecure is the problem. People always ask me like, well, what do I do if I'm insecure? I get these DMs from mothers, of course, never fathers asking, my child telling me these intricate stories of what's going on at daycare or when their child says goodbye or when their reunions and, you know, trying to do this sort of strange situation parlor game, which I totally understand. I do it myself and saying, I think that there is a problem.
Bethany Saltman
00:17:37
I think that my child is insecure because of X, Y, or Z reason. What do I do? And I always say, first of all, if you're paying that close attention to what's going on with your child during reunion, don't worry about it. You're in good shape. The hallmark of a securely attached adult is that we value attachment. So if you are thinking about, and like you were saying earlier, you know, maybe the, the adult is preoccupied thinking about their own parents and why they parented the way they do well. If a parent is preoccupied, that's one thing. But if, if a parent is thinking about my parents, how they parented me, how I'm going to do it differently, or the same, that is a sign of security.
Bethany Saltman
00:18:21
That's what we want. We're looking for the ability to, to think clearly, and to have some mindfulness, some mindsight mind mindedness, you know, there are million terms for it, reflective, functioning around our thoughts around our attachments and a truly avoidant person is not doing that. They are not looking at their child and thinking about their parents or their past, or their own attachment. They're just sort of taking care of business. And that's where the child feels abandoned.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:18:55
So if you're worrying about whether you're doing it right or not, chances are you're doing it right.
Bethany Saltman
00:19:00
I mean, it's probably an over statement, but I that's, it's safe to say I like it
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:19:05
Because there's such a big percentage of securely based securely attached children worldwide, 65% most of you are doing it. Right. So we'll see,
Bethany Saltman
00:19:17
Especially the ones who are fretting about it,
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:19:20
Especially the ones, right. The ones who were trying to get their kid into the kindergarten and the Upper West, Upper East side.
Bethany Saltman
00:19:26
I mean, yeah, there's definitely something to be said for being over-involved and that doesn't score well, and I can't make generalizations, but, you know, put it this way. The hallmark of a securely attached adult is that they value attachment, right?
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:19:43
So let's go to Mary Ainsworth. I really want our audience to get a picture of this breakthrough procedure that she developed because this makes so much sense to me. It made so much sense when I was studying. And in grad school, it made so much sense when I was reading your book, paint a picture for our audience about this procedure, the strange situation procedure.
Bethany Saltman
00:20:06
Sure. So the strange situation comes from Mary Ainsworth's work in Baltimore. The first study that she did of mothers and babies was in Uganda and she was visiting 26 mothers and their children every couple of weeks and spending hours with them, just observing and trying to notice where attachment relationships took place. And so she was a white woman in Uganda. Many of these people had never seen a white person before. And when she returned to the States and went to Baltimore and she wanted to redo this study, she realized that since attachment, as we talked about earlier, is the way that a child responds to their caregiver in a stressful situation.
Bethany Saltman
00:21:00
She wasn't seeing as much of this what's called "secure base activity." This moving back and forth between exploring life and then returning to the mother as a secure base. She wasn't seeing as much of that in her church, in the babies and mothers in Baltimore. And she thought, well, maybe that's because in Uganda, I was the strange thing. They weren't used to seeing a white person. So I saw a lot more stress and a lot more back and forth between, you know, me sort of playing with these kids. And then they'd like scoot back to their mother's laps. And that's when she started to see this secure base behavior happening.
Bethany Saltman
00:21:42
And so she thought, well, these babies in Baltimore who are used to, you know, most of them are white and they're used to me and they're used to... They're Americans. They're used to new people. They're used to babysitters and all the rest of it. Maybe I need to add a little bit of stress to their systems in order to see their attachment behavior at work. And so that's when she said, maybe I should take them into the lab and create a stressful situation that's just stressful enough to get their attachment system online, but not so stressful that they go over threshold and disintegrate. And that's where the strange situation was born. So she came up with it in half an hour.
Bethany Saltman
00:22:24
And the idea is that a baby and a caregiver are brought into a ordinary room, with toys and two chairs. And there's a mirror where the observers can see, but the people in the room can't see them. And so the mother and the caregiver come into the room and automatically the observers are watching. What kind of a baby is this? There are toys on the floor. Most children go to the toys and start to play. Some babies, some babies are running circles around the room from the minute they get there. And then you notice how the baby is relating to the mother. Is this baby one of those kids who's checking in with her mother a lot from the beginning, you know?
Bethany Saltman
00:23:06
So you're just sort of getting a flavor for the child's temperament. And so that's considered episode one, there are nine episodes in this 20 minute procedure. And so the, the second episode is when a stranger comes in and we see what the child does in relation to the stranger. Her mother is still in the room. Exactly. And the mother and the stranger kind of chit-chat and and you see what the baby does. And then the mother leaves the room and you notice what happens to the baby. Is the baby really upset? And if so, does the stranger manage to soothe the baby? Now, this is really interesting because Americans love to have independent babies and they love it when they, Americans, love to say things like "I can give my baby to anybody, and they're totally comfortable right now."
Bethany Saltman
00:23:55
That might be great from a childcare point of view. But from an attachment point of view, you actually want the mother to have a differential relationship to the baby. So that the mother is what I call in the book, "the big guns." You want the mother to be able to do, or the caregiver, the father, the aunt, the grandmother, whomever, the nanny sometimes. You want the primary caregiver to be special. That is one of the markers of a securely attached relationship. It's a special dynamic. It's, it's one of mutual delight. It's something that doesn't happen with everybody. So if the child is able to be soothed by the stranger, that's just something to take note of.
Bethany Saltman
00:24:36
And then the mother returns. That's reunion number one. Does the child go to the mother seeking proximity does, and by the way, this procedure has been done with all kinds of children and caregivers, typical neurally, atypical, grandparents, pets, men, women, you know, every, any, every, any, and everybody and around the world. Absolutely. So you're looking at the first reunion, does the baby go to the mother? Cause we can assume that there is some stress involved and is the mother going to function as a secure base for the baby. And so then the mother leaves the room and the child is alone.
Bethany Saltman
00:25:17
And that's really when we're looking at, okay, what is this? What kind of a person is this? This baby, is this person going to collapse? Is the baby going to run to the door, stand up and scream? what's going to happen. And then the stranger comes again, does the stranger work or not. The stranger leaves ,and the stranger and the mother sort of, they intersect. And the mother comes back. And then that's the reunion that's most important in the whole strange situation. Mary Ainsworth and her crew used to code every single minute, every inch of proximity-seeking on the floor. They have these grids on the floor to see where the baby was moving.
Bethany Saltman
00:25:58
It was incredible. But over the years what's become clear is that what's really important is that second reunion. That's the part that really is getting coded. Does the baby go for proximity? And what happens when the baby does. Does the mother respond? Does the baby seek proximity, but then scale back, do they sit there and ignore the mother? Do they that's, you know what the avoidant baby does or the resistant baby goes in for a hug, but then swats at the at the mother,
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:26:30
Right. angry at the mother? Exactly. Right. So children, little babies can be angry as well, which is just to remember their anger has a target. Before they did this work, nobody
Bethany Saltman
00:26:44
Thought that babies at one could be angry. Right. Or
Kevin O'Donoghue & Niseema Dyan Diemer
00:26:49
It might be teething instead. Yeah, exactly. Angry about some sort of physical, personal discomfort and not about the relationship, not about the break in the relationship. So you're painting a very clear picture and even as you're describing it, and there were other eight scenarios this is a very complicated procedure. I mean, you can simplify it if you want. I'm sure. Anybody can try it at home and you can see, no, I'm going to cut me off that
Bethany Saltman
00:27:19
Please don't try it at home. Because you're not going to know what you're looking for and you're going to drive yourself crazy. Right. Do not try this at home.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:27:26
No. Okay. I'm glad you pointed that out because I could just see how important the results are. I mean, if you're seeing your child panic, when you leave the room like a dog, let's say like, you know, certain kinds of animals will panic when their caretaker is out of eyesight.
Bethany Saltman
00:27:45
That's not the issue though. When you come back, see, that's, what's most important about this. Everybody thinks it's about what happens when the baby's left alone. That is totally irrelevant because we are all different kinds of people. That's where temperament comes in. Some kids are panicky. That's fine. The issue is what happens when the caregiver returns, does the panic subside or not. Right. As the parent, does the parent function as a secure base to bring the baby back to their homeostasis. Some kids are really hyper. Some kids are fussy. Some kids are never settled and happy.
Bethany Saltman
00:28:26
That's fine. That has nothing to do with attachment, that's temperament. What attachment does is shows us, can the caregiver get in there to help the child self sooth back to their level of homeostasis, whatever that is. So don't worry about what happens when you leave, pay attention to what happens when you return, which is exactly why I say, do not try this at home. This is something that is well honed instrument. I studied it for a week, you know, nonstop. It's still constantly unfolding. This is a very intricate situation and strange.
Bethany Saltman
00:29:06
So, yeah.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:29:07
And I'm sure there are like, you know, exponentially millions of variations that you could imagine, like the child, the child does panic. And then the mother comes back and the child doesn't panic, but the mother comes back and can't sooth, or the child mildly upset, you know, there's degrees of being upset. Maybe you don't focus on that aspect of it at all in the, in the procedure. I don't know. But if you did, there could be so many variations. I think you could pay attention to.
Bethany Saltman
00:29:36
It's true. But the fascinating thing is that all babies fall into four
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:29:42
Basic categories. Really three, I'm going to ask you to, to tell us those. When we come back from our break, it's time for our break. We are here with Bethany Saltman, the author of one of the best science books of this year. And for good reason, she takes up Mary Ainsworth's procedures and shows us the current research on attachment. It is called "Strange Situation: A Mother's Journey Into The Science of Attachment."
Kevin O'Donoghue & Niseema Dyan Diemer
00:31:02
Hey everybody. And welcome back to The Positive Mind. I'm Kevin O'Donoghue, I'm Niseema Dyan Diemer and we're in conversation with Bethany Saltman author of "Strange Situation: A Mother's Journey Into The Science of Attachment." and just a little bit more about Bethany. She's a published author in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Atlantic Monthly. She's also a best-selling book coach. She is leading groups specifically for therapists who want to write their book. We're going to have information about her on our podcast and on our website and ways that you can get in touch with her Bethanysaltman.com is also a great place to go, to see more about her, read her blog.
Niseema Dyan Diemer
00:31:45
She's got a great blog about parenting and about some of this attachment stuff that is in her book. And it kind of pulls out some of the, some details and lists.
Kevin O'Donoghuen
00:31:56
Yeah. And boy, does she know how to write a book? This is a great book. We've both read it, Niseema and I, from cover to cover, easy read, very enjoyable even if you're not a psychologist or psychotherapist. Very enjoyable book to read.
Niseema Dyan Diemer
00:32:09
Yeah. I'll tell you, like, I've read some other books on attachment and found myself very lost. And this book, I think, because you've related your experience throughout, and then the science, which I also love, like I love personal story. I love science. And here you have just woven together so beautifully. And we got to learn so much about Mary Ainsworth and all the sort of founders of this work. And it started back in the 50's, 60's. 51 been a while. It's
Niseema Dyan Diemera
00:32:40
Been in development for a while and groundbreaking stuff. Because before this, I mean, we were all kind of, I think, sort of floating in this morass of I had a stressful childhood, I'll never be able to overcome this. How will I be a parent of any worth? If my life was kind of troubled,
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:33:03
Let's use that as a sort of goal for the second half of the show where we can answer those questions. Maybe you're interested in discovering what type of mind, what was I as a child, how am I as a parent. Before the break Bethany was saying that because of this procedure, the strange situation procedure, there were three types that we all fall into. Wouldn't it be useful to know what type you are and if you're a certain type, whether or not you can change it. So, so, yeah,
3
00:33:36
And maybe how that shows up in your life now as an adult,
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:33:39
Right? So Bethany, can you do that? Tell us the three possibilities.
Bethany Saltman
00:33:45
Sure. There are actually more than three, but there are three basic ones. So the, the most prevalent classification that most babies in the strange situation receive is secure. So that's really good news, secure. And as we were talking about before the break, okay, it doesn't have anything to do with temperament. You can be a super chill secure, you can be a sort of edgy, secure. There are many types of secure babies. All secure means is that you can, I would like to say, you know where your bread is buttered. You can go to your parent, your primary caregiver when you're in need. And for the most part, in some manner that basically functions, you get your need met.
Bethany Saltman
00:34:30
So this is most of us, a smaller portion of us are what's called "insecure resistant." Meaning sometimes you get your needs met. Sometimes you don't. This is the case for insecure. I mean, for inconsistent parents, parents who, you know, are really open and warm and generous one minute and then kind of shut down and angry the next. Now this is part of all of us, because everybody's going to say, Oh, that's me. But you know, we're all of these things. Yeah. It's really a matter of propensity. And how, how much of this kind of field are you sowing? You know,
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:35:08
And in this case, it's what the child is feeling in this case before you were saying like how the child reacts in the strange situation procedure isn't the issue. It's how the mother can help soothe. And, and
Bethany Saltman
00:35:21
No, I said, Nope. I said, what's important is not what the mother can do, but how the child responds to the caregiver when the caregiver returns. Okay. So attachment is the child's of view. Caregiving is the adult's point of view, right? So the attachment system is always about the child's point of view. From a child's point of view if your parent is inconsistent, you may end up feeling like you don't trust that they're going to do what they say they're going to do. So when you're in the strange situation and your parent returns, and you're under stress, you know, all of the research shows that babies, even the most placid ones, they've put, heart rate monitors on them and tested their saliva.
Bethany Saltman
00:36:12
And they are under stress. Their stress hormones are up. Their heart rate is up. They're flushed, they're stressed, but a resistant child, an insecure resistant child, otherwise known. It's also sometimes called insecure ambivalent. When the caregiver enters the room, they may go in for proximity, but then they quickly retreat and then they go again and then they retreat. This child is up on their mom, in her arms and then swatting at her face and wanting to be let down and never settling. This is not about what the mother is doing or not doing. It's a dynamic. Okay. And so some babies are you know, I just wrote a blog today about goodness of fit.
Bethany Saltman
00:36:56
I consider myself so lucky my daughter has my half birthday. She's a perfect Aquarian. I'm a perfect Leo. We are a perfect fit. Thank God, temperamentally, you know, astrologically. And that's not the case for everybody. You know, sometimes you're a highly sensitive person like me and you end up with sort of a add profile child, you know, a boy who can't sit still, or a girl who can't sit still, or, you know, who knows. And then that's going to be a much more difficult attachment to forge. And that's just reality, you know? So, the insecure resistant child is that kind of coming and going, and then there's the,
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:37:40
What percentage, what percentage would be a resistant
Bethany Saltman
00:37:43
It's like it gets split down the middle, but they're assisted or resistant is more common than avoidant. Okay. So 65% is secure. And then it's a little bit more on the resistance side, a little bit less on the avoidance side. Okay. So the avoidant baby, when, again, under stress, when they're left alone in the strange situation, this is a scientific fact, but when the parent approaches, they don't even go in for proximity. They may glance at the door. They may not, they don't use the parent as a secure base at all. They don't even try and that's by one year old and that's a child who's given up.
Bethany Saltman
00:38:25
It's a very, very sad thing to see. It's pretty common.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:38:29
So my whole audience is wondering, how do I fix it? Is that possible? If you are secure, you're all good. But if not, if you suspect that you're insecure-avoidant or insecure-resistance-ambivalent, how do I change this? How does it look first of all, how does it show up as an adult?
Bethany Saltman
00:38:52
Right. Well, it shows up very much the way it does in the strange situation as a baby. You know, one thing to keep in mind is that over the lifespan, without extreme events in the positive or the negative, our attachment patterns do have a tendency to remain stable. Now positive and negative events happen all the time. So they can change us for the better or for the worse. But with 75% predictability, our attachment patterns are passed down to the next generation. Now, you know, another thing to really think about here is that, you know, this is not with that said, this is not a life sentence.
Bethany Saltman
00:39:40
And another thing to remember is that even within the patterns of insecure-avoidant and insecure-resistant, these are still patterns of attachment. They work. This is not people in the abyss of disaster. This is a tendency, it's it, all it is indicating is your comfort with your feelings. Hmm. You know, that's the way I think about it.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:40:06
So if you're in an insecure-avoidant, how are you with your feelings
Bethany Saltman
00:40:12
Avoidant. So you're externalizing, you're a major externalizer, you're really focused on achievement. You're really only focused on appearances. You're really focused on how things look on the outside. You're maybe a workaholic. Maybe you're concerned about how you look in the community and your family is saying, "Hey, what about us?" That's sort of a typical avoidant profile, right? As an adult, the resistant person is what's called preoccupied. They are in relationships that are really intense and they're in and out of relationships. And they can't really settle in relationships exactly. Like the resistant child in the strange situation, unsettled.
Bethany Saltman
00:40:57
And now the secure adult can look all kinds of ways. I mean, me being a poster child for security, never in a million years would have occurred to me because I've had a complicated life, you know, all the way through. And I have stable relationships, but I'm intense and I have feelings and you don't know me that well. And you know, so there, so I think it's very, very important to not think of security as some catch all for not suffering. You know, that's a good, because
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:41:34
It's such a nice word secure, Oh, I'm secure, you're insecure, but I'm secure.
Bethany Saltman
00:41:39
Exactly. And so, and it's not about being insecure as a person. We're all insecure. We're all insecure. If we weren't insecure, we'd be enlightened Buddhas. Right. So we're all insecure. But what attachment security and insecurity is looking at is really just your command of your ability to get your needs met.
Niseema Dyan Diemer
00:42:03
And as you said, like to process and digest your emotions, how are you with your emotional state? Do you have capacity to feel express your emotions in a healthy way and can maybe even use those medals? Yeah. Or at all,
Bethany Saltman
00:42:19
Let's say at all, because avoidant people don't express emotions
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:42:24
So they can go in later life, get a therapist or somebody who can teach them Hey, you have some feelings and you might not know it, but they're there. I'm hearing them.
Bethany Saltman
00:42:35
The problem is getting the avoidant person into therapy. They're probably into therapy. If they're listening to this podcast, they're probably not avoidant or someone that they know in their life is making them listen, because they're like, you're driving me crazy. Right. I can't reach you. Right. Where are you? I'm right here. What are you talking about? I do the dishes. I bring home the bacon. What's the problem. I can't feel you, that's the problem. Right? Why I feel you because you can't feel you, why can't you feel you because your parents couldn't feel them. Right. And why couldn't that happen, you know, on and on and on. It's not a bad thing.
Bethany Saltman
00:43:15
It's a perfectly good strategy. And it's an organizing principle. It's a pattern. And we can enliven that pattern by first thing, noticing it, right. Yeah. That's the first step. And that actually is a tremendous step because the avoidance is not being in touch with the thing itself. And so just by studying attachment, by noticing attachment, by wondering about attachment, we're moving the needle toward secure attachment
Niseema Dyan Diemer
00:43:47
And something I might say about avoidance. Because again, like if, if emotions were just never mirrored, we're never in the trauma world, we call this "a state of uncoupling." There was no place for the emotion to go. There was no connection to emotion within the nervous system, in the brain, in the relational field. They're not even in the realm of their experience, their emotions. So it's like, and it's a lot of energy to start to learn how to metabolize. So taking it very slowly is really important. And this is why like coming into a therapeutic relationship, you can start to just open that door very, very slowly. Cause it's a lot of energy that's not being metabolized.
Niseema Dyan Diemerma
00:44:31
And there's a reason why it's not there because there is no capacity for it. So, just to give a shout out to these folks and what needs to happen and same, even with the resistant, l get that sense of like that, being able to manage that push pull and the sort of relational field being stable, like how to really trust that, how to come into a sense of trust of yourself and the other and to just take it really slowly. And it is like a mind/body experience that needs to be cultivated.
Bethany Saltman
00:45:06
That's why somatic work is so important. It can be very bottom up. Yeah. You know, like to bring an avoidant person into presence through their sensations is a really good way to go. That's why mindfulness practice is incredibly important and effective in helping people become more securely attached as adults. And then it will help. And I always tell people, if you can't do it for yourself, because you've got so much guilt and shame, and because we live in a patriarchy that tells women, they're not human, do it for your children, because I know you've been programmed to think you're supposed to be working hard on your kid's behalf. Learn how to practice mindfulness for them.
Bethany Saltman
00:45:47
If you can't do it for yourself, because it is a one-to-one kind of benefit. Right. You know, from an attachment perspective, self care is childcare,
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:46:00
Right? Yeah. Generational care. So let's just point out some of the benefits of a secure attachment. I mean, your book says, if you're not secure, first of all, you know, I can't say enough about the importance of exploration for a child, for an infant even. I mean, I knew that even not ever picking up a book and you can tell which kids go out and explore the world and which kids don't
Bethany Saltman
00:46:31
Yeah. Play play is key.
Niseema Dyan Diemerma
00:46:35
And, and I wanted to bring in with play, you talk about that's where the importance of fathers can come in or the additional caregiver or whoever in the family that play, right is a big part of that.
Bethany Saltman
00:46:48
Yeah. Well, play is actually a huge part of the attachment equation because if a child is insecure, they never relax and you can't play while you're tense. That's the opposite of play. You know, like my daughter, God bless her. She is almost 15 and the girl still plays and I'm watching her move her play into like film editing, "less childish" in huge air quotes kinds of activities. But that ability to relax in your own presence comes from having a secure And that's what play is.
Bethany Saltman
00:47:31
And in the strange situation that's, what's being looked at is the child playing. One of my favorite phrases comes from Mary Maine, who was Mary Ainsworth's student. And she developed along with some others, the adult attachment interview. And she uses a phrase that she calls attentional flexibility, which I love, I think about it all the time. I see it in people, you know, like in the strange situation, the child's attentional flexibility is coming into play when they are able to play with the toys and then look at the mom comes through the door and then get their kind of insecurity soothed And then they go back to playing and then the mom has gone again and looks to see what's happening.
Bethany Saltman
00:48:16
And then that insecurity gets taken care of. And then they go back to playing. That's attentional flexibility. We all know adults who can not do that. We get rigid because we can't relax in a deep, deep way.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:48:33
Bethany, we only have five minutes left and I do want to ask you because I know it's going fast, but there's so many implications to all of what we're saying. And you know, one for me is how do you help, what most typically is a man who has no feelings and has no access to his feelings or a mother or whoever, an adult who has to, what therapies can we design to help them see the wonderful world of feeling and get color back in their life and maybe, present or help the next generation, at least not go through life, not feeling as well. So, I mean, I think that's certainly something we want to have you back on to talk about and all these implications in the book, you talk about the Steels Dr.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:49:17
Steele and his wife, who I might have it wrong. But Miriam and Howard. I know there are so many names. And the concept for them was about these videos that they were showing parents. And I thought, wow, that's brilliant. You know, when I was teaching high school, I thought we are so still in the dark ages about how to teach. That if every teacher was videotaped doing their classes and really given time to study it and look at it that they would improve immeasurably and the students would get so much benefit and still that's not happening. But I thought in this case, the videotaping of mothers being mothers and the attachment situation, this strange situation, et cetera, and how they put it together in a positive way.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:50:06
So can you talk about that? And then can you promise to come back to talk to us further about some of these implications? Because I think we only got to like one 10th of the book.
Bethany Saltman
00:50:17
Well, absolutely. I will be back and we can talk about all the video intervention work and all of that, but to your point, and I think it would be good way to end, you know, the question of how do we bring color back into our lives? Yes. Mary Ainsworth talked about delight, mutual delight as one of the markers of a securely attached pair. So in the pairs that she studied the mothers and the babies, what she saw was that they had an aspect of delight within each other and in their relationship. And so I've done a lot to try to bring this concept of delight out into the open and to say, you know, it works the other way too.
Bethany Saltman
00:51:00
If we don't have delight in our bodies, if we don't have the capacity, we were talking about capacity before. If we don't have the capacity for delight in the things that delight us, you know, a TV show, the smell of Thanksgivingcooking, you know, hugging our dog, taking a walk, whatever it is that makes you happy and makes your heart sing, then we can't delight in our children. And so one way to enter that world is to focus on delight and try to orient ourselves toward the things that delight us towards somatic delight, sensory delight, sensory pleasures.
Bethany Saltman
00:51:41
And I don't mean in a kind of like sit down and eat your face off kind of way, because you become dissociated when we do that. But if we continue to pay attention to our senses, then we know when we've had enough, we are actually enjoying our food. We're enjoying the smell of the fall, the way the the sun, the snow falls, it was snowing here the other day. And I was like, Oh my gosh, it's too, it's too early for that version of delight. But to start to cultivate delight in our lives is a really simple human door we can all open, every single one of us, including like the dude in prison, you know, wherever you are, we all have those chambers of our hearts where that's possible.
Bethany Saltman
00:52:32
And I mentioned in prison because I do a lot of writing with Buddhists in prison. And I'm astonished by the way that people can practice their lives in any circumstance,
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:52:44
Macaroni and cheese, macaroni and cheese. It's hard to find delight in prison, but I'm sure, I guess you can. Yeah,
Kevin O'Donoghue & Bethany Saltmany
00:52:53
Of course you can. It has nothing to do with your external experience. It' your own capacity, like everything we're talking about. Right, right, So I see tremendous implications for therapy treatments, and, you know, just basic every human being on the planet, you can't delight too much in positive psychology. We have the concept in positive psychology of savoring that you can practice savoring every item of food, every sound of music or any sound. Exactly. Every vision, any room, any room that you're in, you can practice savoring
Bethany Saltman
00:53:35
And then imagine savoring your child.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:53:38
Right. Right, right. But food should be totally natural, you know, because why there's another source of delight right. Over there having their own little delights every moment. Yeah, exactly. I just have to give a shout out to my mother who has passed on, but boy, do I remember her delight in seeing me, ah, there you go. I'm going to put this out to our audience. I'm in heaven. When I see my Kevin,
Bethany Saltman
00:54:08
That is so sweet. So at the beginning of our conversation, you talked about how she was busy all the time. You're 11th of 15, right. There's more to it. And I had a feeling when you were talking to me about that, that wouldn't be the whole story. Not at all.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:54:22
She was a natural mother. She loved being a mother, loved it. And it was a natural to her. So she didn't like teenagers, but she boy love young kids. So,
Bethany Saltman
00:54:34
You know, you were the apple of her eye and you knew it.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:54:37
To the detriment of all my siblings, they haven't let me live it down. You know, I don't get any Christmas gifts. So, you know, they think I've had enough. So, so there's something about getting delight early in life. And boy, did I get a boatload of that! So I understand what you're saying. And even as you're talking, I can just see my mom's smiling face. So,
Bethany Saltman
00:54:58
Wow. So there's your internal working model right there
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:55:01
Mothers can do tremendously great things as can fathers and anybody close to a child can do a tremendously valuable thing.
Bethany Saltman
00:55:10
My daughter, just this morning, I said, we were talking and she was talking about a meal that someone had, she loves to eat and she delights in food. And she was saying, if you had had that meal, I know you would have thought of me and brought me home some of your leftovers, which is such like a weird, you know, basic thing. But, but I was like, okay, I feel so good about that. She knows I'm thinking about her. Right. And that's her internal working model,
Kevin O'Donoghue & Bethany Saltman
00:55:40
Which I have to say is very different to what you report in the book, in which we were going to ask you about when you come back on the next show of The Positive Mind that your daughter once said to you, "you know, mom, I didn't ask to be born, right? " So that's a very different view. One moment, one moment. But you share a lot about how difficult it was for you to be a mom. So we want to talk about that on your next visit. We've been here with Bethany Saltman, author of the award-winning, best one of the best science books of 2020 called "Strange Situation: A Mother's Journey Into The Science of Attachment." You can get Bethany at her blog or website, BethanySaltman.com.
Kevin O'Donoghue
00:56:24
And she's also a coach, a book coach. And you know, for people who are looking to write books, especially psychology people.
Niseema Dyan Diemer
00:56:31
We'd like to thank you for listening today. And we'd like to thank our affiliates for airing The Positive Mind: KACR 96.1 in Alameda, California. KAOS 83.9 in Olympia, Washington, KXCR in Florence, Oregon, KYGT, Idaho Springs, Colorado KPPQ, Ventura, California, WGRL Columbus, Ohio, and WRWK in Richmond, Virginia, our producer, Connie Shannon, our chief engineer, Jeff Brady. You can contact us, Kevin and I at info@tffpp.org. That's short for the foundation for positive psychology.org, with questions, comments, or suggestions for the show.
Kevin O'Donoghue & Bethany Saltman
00:57:12
Bethany, thank you so much for being on our show today. We'll see you. Thanks for having me. It was really great to talk to you both. Bye. Bye .