19. Moving from Anxious Attachment to Secure Attachment
Catherine Roebuck lays out how to create secure attachment with yourself and with your partner.
Full Transcript
James: I had to pause because you were way more fun before we started recording.
Catherine: I feel like I'm too much when I'm in that energy.
James: No, you're not. You shouldn't edit it. You're like, “Okay, here's what I'm excited about.” I'm like, “That’s, wait, let me hit record.” And you're like, “No, no, no. Like, where did you go?”
Catherine: This is my professional persona and it's really hard for me. Oh, it's so boring.
James: Thank you for saying that. It's so boring.
Catherine: Okay. Alright. Well, I'll try to do it as fun Katherine.
James: No, no, you're perfect. Like it was, I was so excited. I sat down, you're like, “Okay, here we go.” And I was like, “Yes, I gotta get this.” And you're like, “No. Okay.” See, this is you. You were too much. Yeah, you were too much. You were always too much. Yes. And you have that so deeply ingrained in you that you are too much, and you're not.
Catherine: Right. And so I hide.
James: Half the time you're not even enough.
Catherine: That's so true though. Okay, so one of the things that's really exciting to me about Crucible theory and differentiation is that it's this path from insecure attachment to secure attachment. And that's the holy grail that everyone's looking for, because it's easy to identify your attachment style and to say, “Yeah, I'm preoccupied, or I'm fearful-avoidant.” And then what the heck do I do about this? Because it's ruining my life. It's ruining my marriage. And even though Schnarch was critical of attachment theory, I don't think he disagreed with the fundamentals that our early experiences shape how we attach. What he was pushing people on is to connect with your resilience, connect with your capacity, and grow up no matter where you come from. And his work has been the most helpful thing for me in being able to do that.
James: It has for me too.
Catherine: So that's one of the things I wanted to talk about is just how you apply differentiation to your attachment style. What you do about that.
James: So I'll just talk about my journey. My attachment style is anxious attachment, and it's pretty extreme in that I am, you know, more anxiously attached than most anxiously attached people I know. Not anymore. I really am not anymore, but I definitely was. My mom talks about how when I was a baby, I refused to fall asleep unless my cheek was on her cheek. And that's a pretty extreme anxious attachment. You can say so, yeah. But it's still that way. When I fall asleep at night, I'll just touch my wife's foot or something. And I can fall asleep without that. But I would much rather fall asleep with some physical contact.
But the way my anxious attachment used to show up was that at the slightest hint of my wife's disinterest or preoccupation, or her focusing on something else... So my wife, she is really good at focusing. And so when she sets out to do a project, she will laser focus on that project for hours, days, weeks, and like, nothing gets in her way. It's really kind of impressive. I don't do that at all. But that used to just torture me because I knew, “Okay, Molly's painting a room in the house, that means that I am not going to get basically any of Molly's attention until the room is painted.” And that used to just feel like torture to me. But that's anxious attachment, which is this idea that I'm not going to be okay unless you are engaging with me in some way.
Catherine: Yeah. So I use the metaphor of adaptive cruise control to talk about insecure attachment styles.
James: It's a following distance. Oh my gosh, it's brilliant.
Catherine: So if you have a car with adaptive cruise control, you can set how many car lengths you want to keep between you and the car ahead of you. It's just personal preference. And so there are people with preoccupied attachment, my preference is zero car lengths.
James: You want, like, “I would like to be duct-taped to the car in front of me, please.”
Catherine: Yeah, you wanna be as close as possible. Absolutely.
James: I would like to be sitting on the driver's lap in the car in front of me.
Catherine: And you know, if you get any further than that, if you get three car lengths back, it's so uncomfortable. You start to feel like something's going wrong, things are at risk, you know, this isn't safe. I can't handle this. But the other side of this, the avoidance side, is you want five car lengths.
James: Yes. My wife is avoidant and she would like to be driving on a different highway in a different state, please.
Catherine: Well, the thing I say about avoidant people is they don't want as much space as possible.
James: What they're doing is they're responding to the anxious.
Catherine: That's part of it.
James: Well, it's just the only... I mean, if I'm avoidant, I don't have to push you away if you are already maintaining sufficient distance.
Catherine: But how many people with an avoidant spouse notice that that spouse wants to be in the same room as them and ignore them?
James: Absolutely. Well, like they feed off your anxious energy. They feed off you wanting to pursue them. They get validation.
Catherine: So an avoidant person might want five car lengths. They don't want 75.
James: Okay. You're right. So I was wrong about the different highway, different state. You're correct.
Catherine: And they very conveniently tend to partner with somebody that's gonna chase them. And so you do all the work of getting closer and they do all the work of moving away. And neither of you quite get what you want, typically. Like, you probably settle on three car lengths and you both feel like this is not what I wanted. They're in a relationship for a reason. They're scared to be the one who pursues, to be the one that wants. And you do so much wanting and pursuing that they already feel like you're too close and you spend too much time together and you talk too much and you want too much, and so they're always backing away.
But it's extremely typical, and it's something I've experienced myself, that if you've been the more preoccupied person and you back off, you calm yourself down enough that you can handle aloneness. Suddenly your avoidant partner starts to initiate a few more conversations or get a little closer. They want five car lengths. And if you will allow more space, they'll get closer. But ultimately, secure attachment is the ability to be okay at a variety of distances. And so if you get to where you're secure, you can handle being right behind that other car, you can handle being five cars back. You can even handle being on different highways for a while. And you can feel secure in the relationship and in yourself and your wellbeing the whole time.
James: A different way that I think about it is that secure attachment is my capacity to offer my partner a calm presence.
Catherine: I love that.
James: Yeah. And so because anxious and avoidant is two people processing anxiety through the relationship. So I feel anxious, so I'm going to modify the context of the relationship in order to soothe my anxiety, instead of soothing my anxiety and then offering myself to my partner. And so both partners, we all do want connection, but I have to calm myself down first and then offer connection. So, you know, for me, from the anxious side, I used to think of what I was doing as, “Well, this is love that's driving me towards my wife.” But it was not love. It was anxiety. And so what I have learned to do is calm myself down first and then offer myself, you know, to my wife. And I've gotten pretty sensitive to how much anxiety am I injecting into the relationship right now. Because when I inject anxiety into the relationship, her instinctive way of processing is to process through distance.
Catherine: Right.
James: And so, one other thing that helped me is I feel an intense discomfort in my chest. Like when my anxious attachment would rear its ugly head, I would feel this discomfort in my chest. And one thing that really helped me was realizing that she feels the exact same discomfort, driven by too much closeness instead of too much distance.
Catherine: Right. It's like this fear of being smothered or engulfed or that you're gonna lose yourself in the relationship. And then on the other side, it's this fear of abandonment.
James: Yes, exactly. That was definitely my fear. Fear of neglect and abandonment.
Catherine: Yeah. And on one hand, it's a very real experience, but adults can't be abandoned in the way a child can. And adults also can't be engulfed in the way a child can. You know, these are fears we have that relate to our very real lived experience as young kids where we were having to either create a lot of space with a parent that was overly involved and intrusive in some way, or where we were having to run all the connection with a parent that was distracted or depressed or avoidant themselves. And there's lots of reasons this can happen. Sometimes that's as simple as working with people whose parents were immigrants who were working three jobs, you know, and that parent might really care about their child, but they're genuinely not available due to circumstances. So there's lots of different reasons this can happen. Or you've got a parent that's very sick when you're growing up. It can happen for so many reasons. I do think it typically just comes down to the attachment style of the parent and how that plays out.
And then Crucible offers... you were talking about offering a calm connection. Schnarch outlines what it takes to be able to do that with his four points of balance.
James: Yes.
Catherine: I see that as a recipe for offering calm connection.
James: I can only ever remember three of the four.
Catherine: Oh really? Which one do you forget? Solid, flexible self.
James: Solid, flexible self. And then see now I can't remember any of 'em.
Catherine: We can just go through them. So solid, flexible self is like, I know who I am and what matters to me. I know my values, but I also am open to growing and changing and being influenced over time. So I'm not rigid.
James: But I do care about what I want and I believe in taking care of me and I believe in being responsible for my own wellbeing. Which is the cure for what you're talking about. That's why I can't be engulfed or abandoned, is because I am the one who's responsible for caring for myself and I'm not outsourcing that to my partner.
Catherine: Yes. And that's something that only an adult can do. Most adults can learn to do this. With rare exception, this is a realistic expectation to have of yourself in adult life.
James: And part of the problem here is that in the early months of a relationship, you really can enroll your partner into that role. Like when you are just falling in love and you're like, “Hey, I would like you to kind of care for me like a child.” I mean, there are a lot of partners who will sign up for that for a few months. There is no one who will sign up for that for 10 years.
Catherine: Well, for me, I was happy to do that until I had a child. And that's a very common thing. It’s like, “Uh, yeah, sorry, bud, you're out because the little guy's in here.” But I enjoy a lot of aspects of taking care of people. I get a lot of joy in taking care of my kids. And when my husband's sick, I can genuinely enjoy taking care of him. But that was all fine until I had a kid, which for me was really early on. And so then there's this jolt of like, “You're an adult and this is actually an infant. You need to be something else now.” And this infant doesn't sleep and relies on me for all of its nutrition. I'm tapped out at this point. All my energy's going to this baby now. And so that's a point where the system falls apart if it hasn't already.
Okay, so solid, flexible self and then there's grounded responding, which is don't overreact to your partner's overreactions.
James: Yes.
Catherine: And respond, not react. You choose what you do.
James: It’s me dealing with my own anxiety and slowing down. One way I often express it is, it's not the first response that comes to mind. So let's say my wife and I are having some sort of somewhat anxious conversation. There's a conflict. Both of us are a little bit dysregulated, and the first response that comes to my mind is very rarely the best response. Number two is maybe okay. Number three, we're getting somewhere. And so that takes time. And so what has happened as my wife and I have gotten better at this, is that we have just slowed down. When we do argue, the arguments are more silence than speaking. And I actually think that's a really good rule for having a productive argument in a relationship: more silence than speaking.
Catherine: I agree with you. It's hard to tolerate it, especially as a more preoccupied person. It's super hard, but it's important.
James: It's necessary. This has changed the way I do therapy. Slowing down. Therapy can also be pretty tense at times. Couples therapy can be pretty tense. And I have learned—I really didn't know how to do this last year—but I've learned to be like, “Hey, gimme a second.” Actually, I learned this from you. You are so good at pacing yourself and I've watched you work through these things and you're like, “Gimme a second.” And it's interesting because I can come up with a much better response if I just wait five seconds.
Catherine: Yes. And that's not that long, but it's hard to tolerate the anxiety of even doing that. And when you're working with clients, I think sometimes you can put pressure on yourself that you're supposed to be this guru that has a response to everything.
James: And I do have an instant response. It's just not very good.
Catherine: No. And you know, sometimes when I'm working with people who are super enmeshed in a pattern, or when I'm trying to work my own way out of a pattern that's really deeply grooved in, I'll set a rule for myself or suggest for someone else, like, don't say anything till you've come up with three different things to say, or don't do anything till you've come up with three different things to do. Just to work on that flexibility aspect.
James: Oh, I like that.
Catherine: You know, come up with options and then choose.
James: That's also useful for trying to figure out what's going on, which is, “Well, one possibility is…” I have a problem with my brain, which is my brain loves to jump ahead to conclusions. And I remember my parents pointing this out to me when I was like six, that I would jump to conclusions, and I still do. And so “one possibility is” is super powerful. But if I'm wanting to say that, I should really have done the work of figuring out the other possibility first. At least one other option. “Well, this is one possibility, but another possibility is this,” and that really is a better way of thinking.
Catherine: Yes. And I very often have to consider possibilities like, “Maybe my partner's wrong about me, maybe I'm wrong about me. Maybe neither of us has this clear, and it's something that neither of us can see yet.” But I try to always put on the table—it's a hard thing to make yourself do—but “I could be wrong.” And especially, I look at if I’m having a big reaction to this idea that they're putting out about me or the situation. Often if you're having a strong reaction, there's something in there that has some grip on you. It's not completely off. I think you don't typically react if someone says, “I saw you kicking unicorns this morning.” You know for sure that that's not what was happening. If you're getting upset, there's often some grain of truth that's hard to handle.
So, okay, so we did solid, flexible self, grounded responding, and then meaningful endurance, which is I'll tolerate difficult, uncomfortable things for the sake of growth and for the sake of a better relationship.
James: That's the antidote to the idea of, “I've tried that and it didn't work.” And so, relationship building is a lifelong thing. Endurance means I am willing to commit to this endeavor for the rest of my life. And it bears fruit along the way. It's not like you work for the rest of your life and then after you die, everything's better. It's that things get better along the way, and it requires constant work. One way that I think about this is that the human brain is not natively capable of having a good relationship, most human brains. The exception to that would be if I grew up in a truly exceptional family where my brain was trained from a very young age in the ways of having a good relationship, which is unusual.
Catherine: That would mean you grow up with two parents, or at least one parent, who basically knows how to do these things: to calm themselves down, to have a self.
James: Some people do to various extents. It's definitely the exception, not the rule.
Catherine: Yeah. I think what Bruce Tift says about it, he'll have people say, “I'm willing to feel this way on and off for the rest of my life.”
James: It's so funny because that thing used to bother me so much because I'd be like, “No.”
Catherine: It's like, “I'll do anything to get out of this.” But I think he's talking exactly about meaningful endurance. And his book Already Free is such a beautiful resource on this because it's like, submit to life's terms. Accept reality. I'm gonna feel lonely on and off for the rest of my life. I have since my earliest memories, and despite spending decades and tons of money on trying to resolve my loneliness, it's gonna keep coming up every now and then. And so it's like you make friends with the discomfort. You accept it as part of your life.
James: As Tift calls it, it's workable.
Catherine: It's workable. And you actually know that, because every single person I talk to who's dealing with something difficult like that, you can trace it back decades. And so you actually know that it's survivable.
James: The other thing of Tift that I used to hate is his thing that says, “Well, could you handle feeling this for 30 minutes?” And I'd be like, “No.” But he's right. Yes, I can.
Catherine: You have many times.
James: But literally, until I read his book, I had never thought of it that way. I had just bought into the idea that it is not okay for me to feel this distress. And that was just the way it was. And Tift is like, “Are you sure about that?” And I was like, “Seriously?” But that changed my life.
Catherine: And it reduces the suffering when you do that.
James: Because I was taking action based on avoiding the distress, and the action I was taking was always harmful.
Catherine: Well, and it's an argument with reality because you're taking action pursuing an outcome you're never going to get, which is, “I never wanna feel this way again.”
James: And I'm taking action to try to resolve a problem that's not really a big problem. The thing that causes me this distress, it is never the most important problem in my life. And as I learned to tolerate the distress, now I have all this energy and I direct it towards something meaningful, like developing these four points of balance or calming myself down, or being a better dad and a better husband. Because when I was resolving my distress, it was never pushing me to be a better person.
Catherine: Your biggest problem in this scenario for most people is your argument with reality, that you're trying to change life's terms instead of figuring out how you're gonna live within the bounds of reality.
James: Yes. You're trying to modify your environment instead of changing yourself to become a stronger person.
Catherine: And it's about as effective as trying to eliminate gravity. You will not succeed at this task no matter how hard you work.
And then the last of the four points is calm heart, quiet mind, which is like having a home inside yourself. Having somewhere you can take yourself that is calm and peaceful, a way to get yourself there that you don't depend on another person. And that's one of the hallmarks of secure attachment, is your ability to do that for yourself, to be your own home, to calm yourself down.
James: How do you do it?
Catherine: Well, I talk about self-compassion all the time because I relate to myself, I do a lot of re-parenting myself. I relate to myself with the kind of tenderness that I bring to my kids. And that's an easy way for me to access it because I do feel a lot of tenderness for my kids. But think about it: if the way that we calm down in childhood, ideally, is that we have a really warm, nurturing, compassionate parent, then that's what a brain needs. And as an adult, you can provide that to yourself. And so it's just in how I talk to myself.
I was talking to a client recently who... I think we often carry a core wound or a core fear related to something difficult about how we were parented. And for this client, it was his father would look at him with this sense of resenting him for just existing. And so one of the best ways to, on a core level, calm yourself down and soothe yourself, I think, is to identify what your core fear or wound is and treat it for yourself. So for him, where his core experience was to have his father look at him and indicate he resents that he even exists, the remedy for that is for him to look at himself in the mirror and say, and think, and really experience, “I'm so glad you exist.” This is the medicine that he needs, and he wants it to come from somebody else.
But there's two reasons it's really good for it to come from yourself. One is you're the only person you can make do this. You can't make anyone else. And the other is that you're with yourself all the time. And so if the thing that you need is something that you figure out how to give yourself, you can have it anytime you need it. But if you always only get it from a spouse, how often are you with your spouse and they're willing to do that for you? You're really limiting yourself.
So for me, the core wound or fear is that I'm unlovable or difficult to love. And so the remedy for that is just to love myself and to tell myself, “It's okay. I love you,” as a kind of baseline response to distress. And that's been incredibly beneficial and soothing for me. And you do it enough, it wires in as an automatic thing.
James: It feels so awkward.
Catherine: It does at first. At first it really does.
James: So it doesn't to you anymore?
Catherine: No, it doesn't anymore. But I've been doing this for, I don't know, 17 years. That specific phrase, “It's okay. I love you.” And so, when I started I was in a really desperate place and I did not love myself. I would have this automatic response to something bad happening of just feeling such contempt for myself. And so I just sort of came up with this as the opposite. And it is typically the first thought that comes to my mind when something distressing happens now because I've done it on purpose enough times. And it's also my automatic response to my kids when they're distressed.
James: Hmm. You say those words, “It's okay. I love you.”
Catherine: I do. Sometimes. Or I say other things that have the same impact or I just interact with them with that kind of quality to it. But I think, like, isn't that what we all need? We're gonna have our own variation on this. So for me it's, “It's okay. I love you,” and for my client I was talking about, it's, “I'm so glad you exist.” But they're similar. I think for all of us, it's this sense of, “Is anyone there for me no matter what?” And there's only one person that will be, and it's you. But you could be. How do you do the calm heart, quiet mind?
James: I say, “It's okay. I'm here for you.” Really similar. And I do a lot of breathing. It was about 10 years ago when I first learned that I was anxious. I didn't know. I am an excellent masker and I can play the role of the cool cucumber like nobody's business. Until you really challenged me. I remember there were times like when I was in pilot training when I would crack, and I remember I was at squadron officer school, and we were war gaming and I was in charge of the war game and I cracked. I lost it and I got a really bad grade because of that. But I didn't know that I was anxious because 99% of the time I have this facade of being so relaxed and so checked out and just like, I don't care. It was not true at all. I was wound tight as could be all the time.
And I realized this during my first military deployment. I was out in the desert and I was a drone pilot at the time. We were launching and recovering these giant drones and quite a lot of chaos happens. Whenever the commanding officer would come into our little building, I would get all nervous and I'd look around and everybody else was fine. And I'd just be like, “How can you possibly be okay when the commander is here?” I wouldn't ask them, but I was just like, “What is going on with my brain? Why do I react this way?” And I'd never really put this together before. I would go into immediate severe distress whenever I was in the presence of an authority figure. In the military, that happens all the time. And there are these people who have insane amounts of authority over you. My commander can literally put you in jail, just like that. And so my commanders were decent people, but I related to them as if they were horrible tyrants. That was how my brain reacted, like, “This person is a threat to my existence.” But it was in this deployed area, interacting with the same small group of people, that I would look around and think, “I'm the only one who does this. No one else goes into distress when the commander enters the room. What is going on?” And that's when I started Googling. It took me years to get to the root of what was actually happening.
But what I learned at that moment is there is a way to calm yourself down, which I had never thought of.
Catherine: It's wild. I had somebody tell me when I was like 26 that I could, on purpose, calm myself down. She was a massage therapist. She was talking about it as activating your parasympathetic nervous system. And I was just like, “Whoa.” Because I really had just lived in this kind of fight-or-flight, activated sympathetic state most of the time. It blew my mind that you could do something about that on purpose.
James: Blew my mind too. I was like, “Wait, you don't have to live like this?” This took so many years for me to actually deal with the problem, but the first tools I found were guided meditation and Wim Hof breathing. And honestly, Wim Hof was the one that worked. Guided meditation was okay. Wim Hof was the thing. At the time I would be so anxious. I would be on night shift and I was supposed to fall asleep in the morning and sleep all day. And that was really hard for me. And so I learned that I could do this Wim Hof breathing, which is a 10-minute breathing exercise, and it would put me to sleep. It would calm me down enough to go to sleep, like predictably. And I'm like, “This is crazy.” I've been an advocate of breathing. Like, I'm actually pretty nervous right now. And if I took a deep breath right now, I would just instantaneously lower my anxiety level by 10%. And just the ability to do that is so useful.
Catherine: Oh, well people don't even know how to take a deep breath, like a belly breath. Lots of people only know how to do more shallow breathing. But I use breathing too, and I teach it to people because it's something you can use in almost any situation. I'll have clients be like, “How do I get through a job interview without my palms sweating and my head going to spaghetti?” and it's breathing. That's gonna be your best intervention on your own anxiety in that kind of environment because you can almost always take a slow, deep breath without it being weird. I do it in client sessions all the time when things are getting difficult.
James: The way I think about it is you're doing the opposite of what a scared animal does. And so if you look at a bunny who's feeling threatened, you know, there's these quiet, shallow breaths. The quiet, shallow breaths preserve my ability; I'm making no sound and it doesn't interfere with my ability to hear and smell. If I'm safe, then I can... there's a thing we do. When you get home and you walk through the door, what kind of breath are you gonna take?
Catherine: Oh, like a big, you know, you just breathe in the smell of home and there's such... Yes. In through your nose.
James: So when I walk in my door, everybody does this. I walk in my home, I'm going to go [takes a deep, relieved breath] and it's gonna feel so good to be home.
Catherine: Exactly. It's in through the nose, out through the mouth. Just like they teach in yoga classes.
James: Oh, you're right. It's the sense of safety. And so, I can do that anywhere. I can imagine myself walking into my home after a long trip and I can be like, [takes a deep breath] “I'm home right now.” You know? “I'm home right now.” In myself. My body is my home, and myself is my home, and my capacity to take care of myself is my home.
Catherine: So I think that is secure attachment right there. And I think it's really about forming a secure attachment with yourself, that you become your own home. And from there, it's not that hard to be close to other people because you're always home, or you can always go home.
So you did Wim Hof and guided meditation.
James: Yeah, just like some Calm app or something. That took me forever. I'm still not that good at it, but the way I would describe it is it's the practice of noticing and returning. The mistake we often make with guided meditation is like, “Oh, my thoughts aren't supposed to stray.”
Catherine: Or, “I'm not supposed to have thoughts.” I've never experienced that.
James: What meditation is for me right now—I think this is meditation for most people—is notice and return. It's a practice of noticing what is going on inside my head and returning my attention to my breath. And I think of every time I do that, it's like lifting a weight at the gym. I just strengthen the muscle in my mind, which is the muscle of focusing my attention where I want it to be focused. And so I breathe in and I notice, is my attention focused on my breath or is it somewhere else? Oh, it's somewhere else. Great. Notice, return. And the key is this has to be done with pure compassion and kindness. So if I get harsh on myself, “Oh, darn it, you bad meditator,” then I just... that's not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is my mind instinctively wants to wander. That's what minds do. And I want to strengthen the muscle of notice and return.
Catherine: So it's teaching you three things. It's showing you how to notice your own thoughts and your own mind, what is actually happening, be aware. And then it's showing you how to return back to your intended focus, and to do that kindly. And you can apply this in every situation. And so if you're in a difficult conversation and you're starting to get heated, and your intention in this conversation is to stay calm and kind, then just like in meditation, as soon as you notice it, you don't beat yourself up about it. You're just like, “Oh, that's not what I'm doing right now. I'm trying to be calm and kind. Okay.” Take a breath, go back to it.
I also had a more preoccupied style.
James: Can you just explain what you mean by preoccupied? Is that different from an anxious attachment or is it the same thing?
Catherine: I prefer the term preoccupied because they're both anxious. Avoidant is also anxious.
James: Oh, so you talk about avoidant and preoccupied? I love that. Because this has been bothering me forever, you talking about anxious and avoidant. I'm like, well, they're both anxious. So preoccupied, that's what's happening. Oh, so you've solved this problem. I love that.
Catherine: Well, it's not a Catherine original, but yes, those terms just work better for me for that reason. The way you handle your anxiety is you want to say more, you want to ask more, you wanna get closer. That's preoccupied attachment. You think getting closer to the other person is gonna solve this and you think they have the answers and you're so mad they won't tell you.
But so when you have a more preoccupied style and you're engaging with somebody that has a more avoidant style, and you're trying to slow yourself down, you can use a little mini meditation in your head. I tell people, make one point at a time. Shorter is better. A paragraph of complaints will get you nowhere in a difficult conversation.
James: So true. One way I do this, here's an exercise I've used with couples, is make your statement short enough that your partner can repeat it. And I've enhanced it more, you can get really rigid with this, but it is useful as an exercise. Partner A will speak, and then both partners take a synchronized breath. Then partner B repeats it. And then there's another breath. Now partner B responds and there's another breath. So you take a breath in between. Oh, it's beautiful. That's extreme, and you could cut out some of the breaths.
Catherine: Well, and that requires a lot of collaboration, that both people are on board with this. But if you're dealing with a more avoidant person and they're not necessarily on board with a structure where they don't wanna talk... The other thing I noticed is that, at least for myself and many preoccupied people, we're also just faster verbal processors. It's easy for me to quickly form more words, and it's not easy for everybody. So make one statement, keep it short, and then see how many slow breaths you can count while you wait for your partner to respond. And then you're not just sitting there with your anxiety and ramping up.
James: You've got an activity to do. The other communication thing is I have little drums in my office. And I've had clients, yeah, we will beat them. So the couple has drums and I have a drum, and we all just kind of tap our drum. And then I'm like, “Okay, you are gonna go first whenever you're ready. You're going to say what you want to say.” You stop drumming and you say something. It has to be short enough for your partner to repeat. So you say it and then you go, bum, bum, bum, and then they repeat it. And then we drum again until they're ready to respond. The thing is, when you're drumming, you can't use your left brain at all, and so you can't talk. It's so crazy. So it will take people like 30 seconds to come up with a response because they're trying to drum and to think about how to respond is so hard, but it takes all the tension out of it. It's this beautiful thing. I mean, it's kind of silly too.
Catherine: But you know, that's not a bad thing for it to be kind of silly because the other thing we do is we put life and death stakes on, “You don't load the dishwasher.” We totally do. We make it matter so much. One of the things that I think about, because I work with a lot of people with significant financial means, is I'll watch them put all of their happiness on their partner. They have tons of freedom, and they could be doing all kinds of different things with their time and money and energy that would make them happier. And instead they're sitting around at home fighting with their partner.
James: But this is the default wiring of the human brain because our survival depends on the attachment figure when we're young. Our brains are just wired that way and it's quite difficult to change that.
Catherine: But what I'm saying is, for me, it can help to just bring a little bit of humor to it, even for myself. Like, it's kind of funny that I am sitting here with freedom and means and can't bring myself to do anything about my own happiness, that I'm acting like someone else holds the keys.
James: I totally get it. This was part of my journey. One way I've expressed this is create for yourself a rich and rewarding life and invite your partner to share that life with you, and be totally fine if they say no. Especially for the anxious or for the preoccupied partner. So for me, five or six years ago, I started on this journey where I joined a men's workout group, and I started going to improv class. And later on I signed up for dance class and singing class and I joined another men's group. But I started to create a rich and rewarding life for myself. And now, for example, I just played my very first ever pickleball game with my wife this week.
Catherine: Oh, really?
James: Yeah. Well, she played down here with us.
Catherine: I didn't know you didn't play with each other before this.
James: No, she hates pickleball. She doesn't like it. But that's the thing. But I've created pickleball as part of my rich and rewarding life that I've created for myself. And I go and I play pickleball with my friends and I invite her to come and she always says no, until this week. She always says no, but that's honestly fine. Because I really like playing pickleball without her. I would also like to play pickleball with her, but in the end, it is just not this big a deal because I don't need her to play pickleball with me for me to be okay.
Catherine: Yeah. And Tift talks about taking such good care of yourself that you have no complaint about your partner.
James: Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
Catherine: It's this, and it's hard. And I think the area where it's hardest for people to do this is around sex and intimacy.
James: Oh my gosh. Now there it gets sticky.
Catherine: It's hard.
James: It's not as easy to solve as pickleball. It's really difficult.
Catherine: And that's why it's such a...
James: That's why sex drives so much growth in the relationship. Because my limitations for creating a rich and rewarding sex life, it's very much limited by my wife's participation.
Catherine: Well, it certainly feels that way.
James: Tell me more, Catherine.
Catherine: I mean, one of the things that I look at, that I've started to talk to people more about is, you'll have this idea of the kind of sexual relationship you wanna have and the kind of sex you wanna have, and then you're not having it. You're going off and you're on your own masturbating and you're spending three and a half minutes…
James: Like really bland. Are you saying that's not rich and rewarding? What are you talking about?
Catherine: What people are actually doing on their own in their solo sex life has very little to do with the qualities that they want with a partner. And so I'll challenge them on, “Is your partner supposed to bring all the good stuff here? Where's it gonna come from?” The willingness to slow down and to be romantic or sensual, or to even be creative—because most people are not particularly creative on their own—where's it gonna come from? It looks like it's all gonna come from your partner, because you're not bringing any of this. And so to challenge yourself a little bit on, “Do you have the thing to offer that you want to show up when you're with your partner?” And if you don't, like, maybe you could ease up on them for not having it either. You know that this is really challenging stuff. Now there are people out there who think that you can have just as fulfilling of a solo sex life as you could with a partner. I'm actually not sold on that.
James: Yeah. I don't agree either. I don't think it's real. I just finished rereading Schnarch's Intimacy and Desire, and the core idea in the book is that sexual problems in marriage are incredibly powerful if used well. And I really took that away, that sexual problems in marriage are natural and part of every relationship and to be expected, and they are a core driver of human development if we use them well. A part of using it well is being courageous enough to stand up for what you want and what you see.
Catherine: Yeah. But I've just been thinking about this more, of like, how do you apply that idea of taking such good care of yourself that you have no complaint about your partner to a sexual relationship?
James: No, I think it's totally valid. I agree.
Catherine: I think it's very difficult. And that's why it's hard to create a good sexual relationship long term.
James: And there's a larger thing there of like, what do you realistically... So if you're a higher desire partner, it's so easy to blame your partner for what's not happening in the relationship. And a more accurate view is, what are you really offering to your partner? So for me, as an anxiously attached, higher desire partner, I used sex for most of my marriage as a way to calm down. And so it makes sense that that's off-putting and not attractive because I wasn't really offering much.
Catherine: I'll joke with people about if they made the terms of their proposal clear. So it was like, “Look, two to three times a week, I am gonna need sex or I'm gonna become an ogre. Like, I'm just gonna be really grumpy and mean unless I get this two or three times a week. Will you marry me?”
James: You have to put it in your marriage vows. “I promise to be a monster unless you take care of me.”
Catherine: You know, it's just not very sexy. It's just not very appealing. Not a lot of people are saying yes to that. And so, yeah, to think about the terms of what you're offering, what you're actually bringing here. And it's easy to think like, “Why don't you want more of this good thing?” But if you look at it more closely, how good is it?
James: So one way I think of it is extractive versus generative. Am I pulling or taking from you or am I offering something to you? And the paradox here is that the more I offer, the more I receive. So when I try to pull something from you, I actually don't get anything. When I generate or offer to you, then I do receive. And so there are these things like love and care that the more I offer, the more I receive, and the more I pull, the less I receive.
Catherine: I mean, this term has its own connotations, but you could talk about it in terms of making love versus taking love.
James: Oh, that's even better. Making love versus taking love. Yeah, I love that.
Catherine: The problem is that if I try to take love, I end up not getting anything and not giving anything. You end up making your partner mad.
James: But you know, if I'm doing that, I'm already approaching it from a selfish perspective. And so it's pretty important to just stick with the reality that that is not going to work.
Catherine: But that's the thing I was talking about. You have this idea of what you want, but you don't really know how to provide it because it's not part of your solo sex life. And so you're showing up and trying to extract or take it from your partner, saying, “Gimme the good stuff. I don't have any.” And then you're like, why are they not more interested when I'm showing up and saying, “Look, I don't have anything to offer here. I'm trying to get something from you”?
James: I think it's a fundamental programming thing we have where the human brain starts out as being programmed to get taken care of by portraying helplessness. And so a baby gets helped by portraying powerlessness and by crying and saying, “I'm in immense distress.” And the way you get something is by portraying distress. And I know I used that immensely in my marriage in the early years, portraying distress as a bid for attention, which obviously didn't go well.
Catherine: That's really interesting. It makes me think about how I can remember as a toddler pretending to be asleep so I'd get carried to bed.
James: Oh my gosh. It's so sad.
Catherine: Well, it's like I just didn't wanna walk. You know, it's just a sweet feeling to be carried to bed and tucked in.
James: Yeah. It’s if I portray… I pretended to be asleep when I was a kid too, for different reasons. To get outta things. There's this idea, you never wake a sleeping child, you know? And I'm like, “Aha.”
Catherine: That one worked pretty well.
James: Should we stop this one there?
Catherine: Yeah, we can stop there.
James: Alright. Thanks, Catherine.
