Trauma: a Conversation with Catherine Roebuck

A Conversation Between James Christensen and Catherine Roebuck March 30, 2026

James: The way I think about it is the more intense an experience is—well, maybe a better way to define it is the less capable I am of handling any one thing that happens to me, the more my brain will encapsulate that experience and not connect it to other experiences. So I think of it as an encapsulation or a protective mechanism where the brain says, "This thing happened," and it's sealed off and stored separately from everything else. It's going to have its own special little category, locked up in this little box, and the key gets thrown away.

Not necessarily that I'm not going to remember it—I may or may not remember it—but I'm not going to plug it in. I'm not going to connect it to all of my other life experiences. It's going to be separated out by itself. And I think that exists on a spectrum. The more intense and the more harmful an experience is, or the less capable I am of handling any given experience at any given time, the more encapsulated and protected it gets in my memory. That's kind of the way I think about it. What do you think about that?

Catherine: That makes a lot of sense to me. There's something I read the other day that said the more reactive you are to a trigger, the younger you were when you first encountered that kind of problem.

James: Right.

Catherine: And that lines up with what you're saying, because the younger you are, the fewer options you have for what you can do in the face of something overwhelming. If you encounter something as a baby or a toddler that's very distressing, basically your options are you can appeal to your caregivers by crying and hope that they come through for you. If they don't come through for you—if they're not available or not responsive, or they're the ones actually causing you harm—you don't really have a lot else you can do.

You're out of options really quick when you're young, and so you can have a very big reaction to something if the first time you encountered it, you had very few options. You were super dependent and young because it genuinely was an existential threat at some point, and it'll still be wired that way in your brain. Your brain will wire it up originally as "This is an existential threat if this happens," and even if it's no longer true because you're an adult with other options, if you haven't reworked that, you can still react to it with that level of panic.

James: And panic was the appropriate response when you were young and helpless. That was the best thing you could do. In fact, it was important that you respond to dangerous things with extreme distress or panic and make a lot of noise about it, because that's how you stay alive as an infant and a toddler—by making a big fuss about things you can't handle.

Catherine: Yeah, that can happen. Or at some point, an infant or toddler could also just shut down. It's not always getting loud. Those are kind of your options: you can get loud and ask for help, or you can dissociate and shut down. Those are pretty much what you can do when you're really, really little.

James: But there's not a third option. There's not an option where you engage directly with the problem and do something about it, because there's nothing you can actively do about it when you're tiny and powerless.

Catherine: That's right. And that's most true when you're youngest, but there can also be situations even when you're older where there's not a lot else you can do—where you're facing a threat so big that you can correctly assess, "I won't win a fight. I can't get away. I tried appealing to this person and that didn't work." And so then your option is pretty much dissociation. That's it.

James: Yeah, and that is a useful thing to be able to do.

Catherine: There's research on different types of trauma experiences that finds that if you are able to do something to try to change your circumstances, you're less likely to develop PTSD—even if it doesn't work. If you make an unsuccessful escape attempt, it's still less traumatic to your brain to have tried something than not to have tried. The helplessness is one of the things that really seems highly linked with trauma. When you're in a situation where there actually is nothing you can do, that's one of the things that can lead to your brain handling it as trauma.

And like you said, just encapsulating it—it gets recorded differently from your normal experiences. It gets stored more as imagery and sensory data, and it doesn't necessarily have a story attached to it or words attached to it.

James: The way I think about it is it lacks context. And so the way I tend to think about healing from trauma is I'm going to help my brain create new connections, or build bridges between this very difficult thing that happened to me—usually while I was young—and my current life, where I'm capable of dealing with something like that.

If someone tried to pull something like that on me today, there's a whole list of things I could do about that and I would do about that. My ability to handle difficult situations in my life now is a hundred times greater than it was when I was, say, two years old.

Catherine: Yeah, exactly. So you were saying the way you get better from trauma is by putting it in context?

James: Yeah, it's adding context. I think of it as building physical neuronal connections in the brain. I don't know whether that really happens, but it makes a lot of sense to me that if my brain encapsulated this memory and sealed it off, then one thing I can do about it is help the brain make more connections between all the things that have been true about me at various stages in my life.

So there was a time when I was tiny and vulnerable and dependent, and there is a time now when I'm not tiny, not vulnerable, not dependent. And I would like to be able to respond to difficult people in my life now from the correct context of "This is a difficult person, and I'm a powerful person who can handle difficult people." Whereas when I was young, I could not handle difficult people and there was basically nothing I could do—nothing effective.

I could make some noise or dissociate, but there was nothing effective I could do to take good care of myself in that moment. And my brain likes to respond to difficult people in my life now with the response that was appropriate to the past, when I was less powerful.

Catherine: Brains are pretty complicated, and I'm not an expert on them, although I wish I were. But my guess is that there is something that happens on a neural connection level. If you think about someone who's gone through a pretty difficult childhood and they've had many traumatic experiences, there are all of these different places in their brain where a memory or information is encapsulated. As you're going about your day trying to function, your brain is going to keep hitting walls, keep hitting blocks, and it has to take these quite roundabout paths.

I think it's just much more work to function and to think and to connect with other people when you're working around all of these isolated things in your brain. As you process trauma, you put it in context. You get a clearer picture of what was really going on, why it was such a big problem, and why it's not as much of a problem now. You're able to take much more direct paths. That's how I think about the jump in functioning that can happen when people start to deal with their traumatic memories—it's actually making it possible for your brain to function much more efficiently.

James: That makes sense. I've never thought of it as being a direct path, but it's like if there were giant potholes in the road and then you patch the potholes. Or if there was a gate cut through a fence—instead of going around the fence, now there's a gate and I'll open the gate and go directly. That's an interesting metaphor.

Catherine: That's how I think about it.

James: I think of two different paths which are related, but I think it's useful to categorize: inner child work and inner adult work. Both of those are useful as ways to improve the connectivity in the brain, improve the brain's ability to hold correct context, and to not perceive things in the wrong context.

So if a difficult person enters into my life, or I have to deal with a difficult person—that's not, for me as an adult, a survival situation. But it will feel like a survival situation. When I'm dealing with a difficult person, I might get physically shaky, I might start sweating, my heart might start pounding, it might be hard for me to talk. I see those as responses where my body is saying this is a survival situation, which I think is not the appropriate response given the context I'm in, but it is how my body responds.

Do you think of it in terms of inner child work and inner adult work, or is there a third category? Do you not use those categories at all? How do you think about this?

Catherine: I think those are great, and I love that you're bringing up inner adult work especially, because there is a lot of emphasis in therapy on the wounded child and taking care of the wounded child—which matters, don't get me wrong, life-changing stuff—but you could get a little stuck in it. There was someone we went to a training with—Steven Gilligan—and he talked about how when he's working with someone, he'll notice whether they're more connected with their wounded child or their powerful adult internally when talking about an experience.

He'll try to balance it, to get them to connect with whichever side they're less connected with in the moment. If someone comes in talking about trauma but they're doing it from this place of "Well, it didn't affect me and everything's fine now," then he tries to get them to have some compassion for what it was really like when they were five.

James: Yeah. And in the end, I think both of these pathways end up creating more connection. The way I think about it is that our brains, as they develop, we add onto the brain but we don't ever delete from the brain—once again, I'm just guessing, but that makes sense to me. The parts in my brain that developed when I was four and five years old are still there. I've added new parts since then. And what I want is more connectivity between the old parts and the new parts.

Catherine: I mean, we forget a lot of daily things. Most people don't remember their daily life throughout their life. In that sense, things do get kind of deleted from the brain, or they just get grouped into a routine—like "I understand that I got the bus every day, but I don't remember every time I took the bus."

James: Yeah, I'm not thinking so much about memory as about levels of functioning. I had developed a way of dealing with the world when I was five years old, and I really think that pattern is still in my brain. That programming's still there, and it shows up sometimes.

I also think that since I'm now almost fifty, I've developed a lot of more effective ways of dealing with difficult situations. But I don't think the old ways went away. They're still there. When I start acting in a childish way, it's because the part of my brain that developed when I was a child has taken control of my behavior. That's kind of how I think about it.

Catherine: Yeah, I agree with that framing. That makes a lot of sense. And so the inner adult work—sometimes you'll encounter someone who is handling most things in their life with the level of resilience they had at six, and they just have a hard time really seeing the truth that they have more options now.

You can do work where you basically update your brain. "Hey, let's look around at our resources now. Let's look at our options now." When you were ten, you maybe didn't have a choice about whether you stay in the room when someone's yelling at you. But now that you're forty-five, you do have a choice. Maybe you don't have to stay there.

The inner adult work—you really just have to be open to both connecting with your capacity and connecting with your vulnerability. And I do think there's so much to be said for the connection aspect of this—you're just building more paths in the brain so it's not stuck with one way to handle things, like "All I can do is get upset."

James: So tell me how you do inner child work with your clients or with yourself.

Catherine: With clients or with myself, I try to focus on visualizing, because of how difficult memories are stored. There are a couple of ways memories are stored. One is data, which doesn't tend to change over time. Another is narrative—the story we tell about what happened—which changes as you tell it.

If a client tells me a story about getting lost as a child, they have one story that maybe a parent told them and now they tell it. If I have them visualize this, I'll say, "Okay, go back to the moment you realized you couldn't see your mom. Look at the scene. Can you see the room around you or the area where you are? Do you see yourself?"

One thing that often hits people is that they look young. The way they've thought about themselves in a memory is often as older than they actually were. When you start thinking about it—do you know a five-year-old? How little is a five-year-old? A lot of people I work with are parents, and they'll have a lot of compassion for their kids and awareness of how little their children are, but when thinking about their own childhood, they felt quite mature.

Then you go into what's this five-year-old feeling? What is this like for them? Instead of just skipping to what happened in terms of "How did you end up getting reunited?" you're trying to go into what was the experience on a sensory level—what could you see, what could you hear, what were you feeling, what was your internal feeling?

People will spontaneously experience some compassion for their young self when they start connecting with that—compassion that was absent when they're just telling the story as data and analysis, just saying words without really feeling anything about it. When they start to look at the scene and connect with their felt sense, that's often the first time someone actually sits with that lost, scared kid and takes in what it was like for them.

James: So you would consider that a kind of inner child work?

Catherine: Yeah, I do. And there are things you can do that go further than that, where you can start paying attention to what did you want, or what did you need in that moment? What would have made this better for you? That's also helping you connect with the experience of what it was really like, and what kinds of support a child in that situation would need, and what it was like that you didn't get that.

But a lot of what I do really just goes to that point of making contact with yourself. And I see it as you're making contact between one part of your brain and another part of your brain, using this metaphor as a way to work with your brain.

James: Yeah, because you can't tell someone, "Would you please connect neuron A to neuron B?" That doesn't work. But you can say, "What did you look like when you were five? How tall were you when you were five?"

Catherine: Right. And if there's someone else involved—which in many traumatic memories there is, because trauma is mostly interpersonal—trauma is more about how the people who saw what you were going through reacted than it is about what you were going through a lot of the time.

James: This is so important. It's about the context as a whole. It's about the world you were living in—what was true about the environment you were living in that you as a small person could do very little to change. You're living in this environment, can't really do anything about it, and it's not very well suited to you in some way. It doesn't provide the kind of support you need. Children need immense amounts of support, and in some way this environment is not providing you the kind of support that you need. So you have no choice but to respond to it in the best way you can, even though it's not very effective.

Catherine: Yeah. So if you go back to a memory where you're little and you have a parent that's disciplining you in a somewhat harsh way, part of that—if you look at the scene—you're going to become aware that your distress was clear. And so then you're not just dealing with "What did it feel like to have a parent hit you?" You're dealing with "What did it feel like to have a parent see your distress and keep going?"

James: So you're looking at the information about what was going on in my parent's mind while they were doing this thing.

Catherine: Yeah. How were they relating to you? What were they thinking about you that made this work for them, that they could keep going? And you can push yourself to imagine: if I were a parent and this were my child and I saw their distress, what would I have to do inside myself to be able to continue the thing that's causing them distress?

James: What would I have to be? How would I have to be thinking about my child in that moment? Am I looking at this child and saying, "This is a person I care about, this is a person I don't want to suffer"? Or am I thinking, "It's okay with me if this person suffers. It's okay with me if this child experiences distress. That doesn't bother me right now"?

Catherine: Well, it could be that, or it could go even darker: "I own you. You deserve this. This will show you." There are all kinds of things that could be happening, but that's the thing that kind of blows your mind—when you're going through a traumatic experience and you understand, though you couldn't put it into words, how this person is relating to you to be able to continue treating you this way. That's the thing that is overwhelming to the system.

There's some research with Hurricane Katrina survivors that found the thing that predicted how likely it was that they would develop PTSD was their interpersonal interactions with other people. Were they in a situation where they needed help and somebody saw that they needed help and could have helped them and didn't? That's the thing that caused the trauma. It's very different if your leg gets broken because a tree falls versus your leg gets broken by another human being on purpose. Those are going to have really different impacts on your brain.

James: Yeah, of course. Why is it beneficial to go into "What was my parent thinking while they were being mean to me?" Why does that help?

Catherine: I think it helps you locate the problem. One thing trauma does is leave you with a feeling of "There's something wrong with me." Because you're getting the message "I deserve this." But what could a little child do to deserve abuse? Nothing. So you're left with this twist in your mind, something very difficult to work with—a feeling of fundamental shame or inadequacy or wrongness.

When you push yourself to look at the scene and to map the mind of your antagonist, you can correct the record in your own brain of what was the problem here. Was it that I was the kind of child that deserves this? Or was it that my parent was the kind of person that liked to do this?

James: Children are, by definition, innocent. Parents don't get the same treatment. You and I are both parents, and we know that it wouldn't be fair to say we've been innocent as parents, even though we wouldn't consider ourselves bad parents. But claiming innocence would still not be accurate. Specifically, in an interaction where I am angry at a young child, the young child is just by definition innocent. Children do age-appropriate things, developmentally appropriate things, which are inconvenient, unpleasant, and hard to handle.

If I come into a situation and say, "You are being a bad child and I am being a good parent"—which is something that happens every day in most families—that's just not true. It's turning the world upside down. In reality, you have a child who's being innocent, even if I'd like that child to stop that behavior. There's a certain innocence to the behavior, and the parent's behavior is just not that innocent. As adults, especially as parents, we carry a level of responsibility that children just don't carry.

Catherine: Yeah. A lot of times when parents become harsh with their kids, what's going on is the kid is dysregulated and the parent is dysregulated. The kid is overwhelmed and the parent is overwhelmed. But one of these people has a lot of power and agency in their life; the other has very little.

One place I see this play out is theme parks. If you watch families in theme parks toward the end of the day, you're going to see kids melting down and parents melting down. But the parents have had the option all along to call it on the day and go back to the hotel and cool down. They've passed their own limits and their kids' limits, but the kids didn't have that power. The parents are in a much better position in every possible way to manage a situation so it doesn't go to the point of harshness.

You'll see a parent yelling at a child for yelling. The child is innocent—they're just displaying their actual level of overwhelm and a completely developmentally reasonable inability to self-soothe. And the parent is saying, "Well, I'm only acting out because of your bad behavior." They're justifying whatever they're doing with the kid's behavior. But it's putting more responsibility on the child for how things go—saying the kids are the ones who decide—and that's not reasonable. The parent has decades of life experience, a fully developed prefrontal cortex, money, options. The kid is pretty much at the mercy of the parents.

James: I do want to add one more idea about inner child work. I have found it useful to do an inner child rescue, which is a very common practice in trauma treatment. An inner child rescue basically consists of imagining myself as an adult going back to a difficult memory from my childhood, and I, as an adult, am going to offer my younger self the kind of love and support and protection that I needed in that moment.

Once again, I'm visualizing it. It's purely imaginary—time travel isn't real—but it's a helpful way for me to build these connections within my brain between the very young and vulnerable part of me and the more powerful part of me that's also capable of comforting a child.

Catherine: I think inner child rescues are beautiful. My guess is that the way they work is you've got something in your brain where you encounter a problem that's familiar because it reminds you of something that happened when you were young. Your brain only knows that this is a problem. It doesn't know that there's a solution, because when this was originally encoded, there wasn't a solution. It didn't get solved. It didn't get handled well.

So you go in and complete the stress cycle or finish the story in a way that the next time this trigger comes up, instead of your brain going, "Oh no, there's a big problem"—and that's where the story ends—it goes, "Oh, there's a big problem. And there's someone here who can help me with this. It's me." So it's a much less distressing experience, because you build trust in yourself and confidence in your own ability to respond. And then you don't panic the next time it's triggered.

James: That has been my experience. I've done many inner child rescues and they have consistently helped me respond in a more productive way to the sense of panic that arises.

For me, an inner child rescue often ends with me looking at my younger self, this little boy, and saying—that's going to make me cry—but saying, "I will always be here for you, and if you call, I will answer." The way I think of him calling is when I feel that distress arise. When I as an adult feel the kind of panic associated with being a small person in a scary world, I try to remember in the moment: this is the part of my brain saying "Help! I don't know how to deal with this." And there's another part of my brain that says, "Well, I do."

I want to make that connection in the moment, but my brain doesn't naturally behave that way. Naturally, this younger part of my brain says, "I've got this. We're going to throw a fit, or dissociate, or take some sort of extreme action—get angry or manipulative—we're going to take these childish actions." As opposed to the fact that a lot of the time as an adult, the best response is, "Let me think about this for thirty seconds." As an adult, there are so many situations where you can just sit there and do nothing and say, "I'm in a difficult situation. I'm going to sit here and do nothing until I figure out what to do about it." But the younger part of the brain wants instantaneous action right now. And often, doing something is not the best plan in the moment.

Catherine: That's exactly what's happening. We were talking earlier about kids being innocent and parents not being innocent. But there is a way that all that's going on most of the time in the mind of a parent who doesn't handle themselves well is they're having a childish response. They haven't had the support or resources or a way to think about it to be able to handle it better yet. They do have the capacity to get there—and they should be in therapy—but you can have compassion for other people's reactivity as well when you think about it as, "Yeah, this is their inner seven-year-old saying 'I know how to handle this.'"

We all just come up with these strategies when we're young and use them until we replace them on purpose. They don't necessarily get updated organically. You have to think about it. You have to watch what you're doing and think about your impact and think about whether you have other options at this point in your life. And yeah, a lot of the time, one option you have is you could slow yourself down and do nothing for a couple of minutes, and then see what you can come up with in that time.

James: All right, let's transition into inner adult work then, because this is actually getting pretty close. Can you describe—if you were going to explain inner adult work to someone, what would you say?

Catherine: One thing I like to do is just talk things through with people so they can make sense of the problem with what they're doing. For example, I had a client reach out about a difficult interaction he'd had. His wife had said, "This is emotional manipulation." And he asked me, "Is that what I'm doing here? Am I being emotionally manipulative?"

I work with a lot of people who are very logical thinkers and I really like to work that way. So I offer a framework for how you could evaluate: is this emotional manipulation? For me it's "Am I using intense negative emotion to try to get what I want?" If you're working with someone's inner adult, you can evaluate through that logical lens. "All right, that actually is what happened here." First step is recognizing the problem in a concrete way, and then once you're not okay with what you've been doing, you can push your brain on what else you can do. What's coming to mind for you for inner adult stuff?

James: My favorite way to frame this is: as a child, it made sense for me to pay more attention to others' impact on me than to my impact on others, because I was young and dependent and I really needed to pay attention to what other people were doing to me. As an adult, I'm in a position in life where it actually makes a lot more sense for me to pay more attention to my impact on others.

This is especially true in the family. If I want to live a good life and be happy, the single most important thing for me to do as a married man is to pay attention to the emotional impact I have on my wife. That is not something that comes naturally to me. What comes naturally is to pay a lot of attention to the emotional impact she has on me. That doesn't help me very much because I can't directly change that. It's fine to be aware of it, but if I spend a lot of my time and attention on what impact she's having on me and how much I don't like that, then I'm basically spinning my wheels. What I really need to do is set that aside and focus on: What is it like for her to live with me? What is it like for her to be married to me? That's the most important thing for me to look at. But it's very much an adult way of dealing with the world, and it doesn't come naturally to most people in my experience, and definitely not to me.

Catherine: I think that's really good. Another reason it makes sense for adults to look at what they're doing is that they have choices. If you're with someone who is really not treating you well and doesn't want to change, you're probably not going to get very far trying to appeal to them. At some point you've got to deal with the reality: I'm an adult choosing to be in this dynamic. So I should look at what am I doing that keeps the dynamic going?

Another way to think about it is: what bad behavior on my side makes it easy for this other person to justify what they keep doing to me? It's not to say that you don't hit a limit where you just have to decide whether a situation's workable for you. You look at your side and work on your side. If you hit a point where you're like, "No, I've done so much on my side and I don't have the power to change this dynamic," then you accept that and work on the reality you're in.

James: You make your choices based on what you see is best for you. In some situations, leaving a relationship is part of the solution. That's what you're talking about, isn't it?

Catherine: You could leave, you could change the level of contact you have.

James: The other way I like to think about this is: all of the things my wife is likely to do this year, including all the things I don't like, they fall within the circle of what I can handle. I call it my "circle of okayness." My brain doesn't like to think of it this way. My brain likes to think, "There's this and this that she does, and I really don't like it, and that's a survival problem for me." It sounds silly to say it that way, but my brain really does respond to her behavior as if it were a survival problem when it's not.

I like to push myself on this. I will say things like, "If my wife never changes, will I be okay?" And the answer is yes—I will find a way to be okay. That's very much my responsibility as an adult, to find a way to be okay in whatever environment I find myself in. It is not a good idea for me to think of myself as dependent on my wife changing.

I know there are circumstances—I'm not in one—but there are people in circumstances where it's really difficult to find a way out of a difficult relationship. For me, it's important to think of my life as something I can handle. It's not a survival situation, which means it makes more sense for me to focus on my impact on her and focus less on her impact on me.

Catherine: I'd add one more focus: your impact on yourself. In a situation where it really is untenable, you have to look at your impact on yourself. Keeping your focus on the details of the mistreatment is probably not going to be the answer. You're up against practical challenges of how to extract yourself, which could be about your own brain having a very difficult time detaching, or other obstacles.

As an adult, you have a huge impact on yourself. You have so much agency, so much power to determine who you interact with and how much you interact with them and what kind of contact you have. If you determine that this person has a bad impact on you and you don't see that changing, then you have to look at what you need to do to take good care of yourself.

That still means taking your focus off of an obsession with tracking and venting about the stuff they're doing. Not that you go blind—there's some level of awareness that is healthy and important. But I'll have clients who come in and what they'd like to do for an hour is just list off the bad things their partner did that week, and then do the same the next week. Sometimes I'll say, "Let's start with a blanket assumption that your partner's not handling themselves well. Let's look at how you are handling yourself. Let's look at what you're actually doing in this. You're an adult. You can change your life, and you can change your relationships."

James: I encounter that a lot also, where someone's putting a lot of energy into trying to convince me their partner is doing bad things. I'll just stop them and say, "You know what? I agree with you. In fact, I think you see your partner really accurately, and I'm glad you do. So I would like you to stop trying to convince me that you're right, because I'm already on your side here. I want to talk to you about what you're going to do in this situation. How are you going to handle this?" That's a kind of inner adult work, I guess.

Catherine: Another thing I think about with inner adult work is getting connected to your values—making decisions based on values and not based on how another person is going to react or what they tell you you can and can't do.

I see this show up when someone says, "I can't. I'm not allowed. They won't let me." That's usually about a partner, sometimes a parent. It's like, okay, they can put pressure on you. But this is about you making a decision for yourself based on your own values and moving into a peer-to-peer position: "We're both adults here. You can tell me what you want or don't want. You can put pressure on me, you can criticize me. But whether I am honest with you is not decided by whether you're going to get mad. It's decided by whether I value being honest."

James: In the end, obviously it's easier for me to be honest with you if you're not going to yell at me. But it's still my choice. That's what you're talking about: can you take full responsibility for all of your behavior, no matter how your partner responds to it?

Catherine: And I do think you can make requests. You could say, "Hey, I really want to talk to you about something important. It's going to be pretty hard for me to get through this, and I expect it'll be pretty hard for you to hear. If you're willing to try to hear me out, it would mean a lot to me." You can make requests.

James: Have you ever seen a Time Timer? It's a little visual clock, and you could say, "I'm going to put two minutes on this clock, and my request is that you just listen to me for two minutes. Then after I've talked for two minutes, I'll give you two minutes." It seems structured and a little artificial, but if every discussion ends up with two people stepping on each other and talking over each other, it's important to get to a place where I can speak, then there's a pause, then you can speak, then there's a pause. If that helps you get there, then it helps you get there.

Catherine: One of the things that can be hard about seeing yourself as an adult is relating to your parents adult-to-adult. I think the reason it's hard is that your relationship was laid down initially when there was a genuine power imbalance—you were a child, they were an adult. Getting your brain to handle contact adult-to-adult, where you're not afraid of them, you're not deferring to them, and you're also not trying to be ultra-harsh to exert power over them—just trying to do this in a peer-to-peer way.

I think that's one of the things that has the biggest impact on your brain: when you start to relate to your parents as "We're both adults, we're both grown up. I'm in charge of my life. I can tell you the truth and you can have your reaction. But you're not my guardian anymore."

James: It sounds a lot easier than it is. It's actually really difficult. And it impacts your ability to talk to your partner like an adult. If I can't talk to my parents in an adult-to-adult way, it's unlikely that I can talk to my partner in an adult-to-adult way, because that same programming that shapes how I talk to my parents is going to show up in how I talk to my partner.

Catherine: That makes sense, because this is your main attachment figure. When we get into romantic relationships, we're following attachment patterns that started in childhood—an important other that we're really attached to.

James: So it's really useful to imagine talking to one of your parents about something they would get defensive about. I think it's a really useful exercise: to visualize what would be the most direct and most powerful way—without being mean—to say, "Mom or Dad, I want to talk to you about this thing that you did that had a negative impact on me."

Most parents of adult children will get defensive in that scenario. They don't want to be held responsible for the worst impacts they had on their children. They'll start making moves to make it seem like the adult child is in the wrong, or they weren't really responsible for their behavior, or it's not okay for the adult child to be bringing this up for some reason.

Catherine: There's a dynamic that's part of the defense reaction: "Hey, you're breaking a family rule. I get to tell you when you do something I don't like, but you don't get to tell me when I do something you don't like."

James: And that rule was established in the first place because the parents were fragile and insecure. A parent who's fragile and insecure in their thirties and forties is probably going to be fragile and insecure in their sixties and seventies. They're probably going to have that same defensive reaction: "You don't get to do this to me," and they're going to make some moves to keep you from doing it.

Catherine: I agree.

James: So that would be inner adult work. The last thing to talk about is the connection between the two. The more inner adult work I do, the more effective my inner child work will be. And this actually ties back to what you said about Steven Gilligan at the very beginning—we need both. I need that tender connection to the young parts of my brain, and I need the connection to the strong and powerful parts of my brain.

Catherine: It makes me think about a therapist I had about fifteen years ago. I was talking about a very difficult situation I was in and she would say, "Look at your hands and remind yourself these are not child hands." Like, "I can handle this." But I'd look at my hands and think, "I don't know what I'm doing. I've never handled this." I wasn't looking at the hands of a woman who knows how to do this.

So yeah, you have to build up. If you're going to become less reactive and the reactivity is coming from a wounded child place, to really become less reactive, you have to build trust and competence to handle your life. The stronger your inner adult, the calmer your inner child. They really do go together.

James: Absolutely. And this is a mistake I think happens a lot in the world of therapy—skipping over the strong adult part and trying to go straight to the wounded child. But who is the wounded child going to turn to if there is no strong adult there?

Catherine: In that situation, people try to turn to their partner usually, but their partner is usually not really willing to consistently take care of them. My view is that because you're with yourself all the time and you're not with anyone else all the time, the only really reliable source of someone who could help you out anytime you're triggered is going to be yourself. There are other people—therapists, coaches, friends, your partner—who can help you sometimes. But if you want someone who's on call and always available, which is what any scared child part is going to want, it actually has to be you.

James: It does have to be you. It really does. And there's also a fairness question: is it reasonable for me to ask my wife to be supportive and patient with me in a way that I'm not capable of being supportive and patient toward myself?

Catherine: I do think that's fair. In general, I think it's good to look at what you want from other people through the lens of "Do I have this to offer?" Not that everything is perfectly symmetrical, but these fundamental things—wanting someone to be warm, patient, nonjudgmental—asking for it before you can offer it is often asking too much. Partly because you'll just be too hungry for it before you have it to give. If you're not giving it to yourself, you're always going to want more of it than they have the capacity to offer.

James: I think we should end there. That was a very good, strong last sentence.

Catherine: Great talking to you, James.

James: It was so good. Thanks for this amazing conversation, and let's have many more.

Catherine: See you soon.