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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is David Wallin. David Wallin is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Albany and Mill Valley, California who has been practicing, teaching, and writing about psychotherapy for more than three decades. His classic book Attachment In Psychotherapy has been translated into ten languages.
He’s lectured on attachment and psychotherapy in Australia, Europe, Canada and throughout the United States. With Sounds True, David Wallin is offering a new eight-week online course called Attachment in the Practice of Psychotherapy: Relational Transformation, Nonverbal Experience, and the Psychology of the Therapist. This is a course that begins on September 11th, 2017, and you are welcome to find out more at SoundsTrue.com.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, David and I spoke about how our early life experiences can lead to either secure or insecure attachment and how to understand the four different attachment patterns or styles that are now widely accepted in psychological research.
We also talked about how in David’s own experience, there have been three big healing factors pointing him in the direction of secure attachment—a good marriage, effective therapy, and the practice of meditation. We talked about what parents need to know to raise children who are securely attached, and how important it is to make room for the complete inner life of a child.
Finally, David and I talked about the importance of tracking nonverbal experience in psychotherapy and how that can point a therapist in the direction of discovery. Here’s my conversation with the very warm and very brilliant David Wallin.
To begin with, David, you’re known as the author of the classic book Attachment In Psychotherapy. I think more and more people are starting to hear about attachment styles, attachment patterns, if you will, and even these four different designations—secure attachment, avoidant attachment, ambivalent attachment and disorganized attachment—but I think as this language of attachment styles enters the culture, there’s a lot of misunderstanding.
Where I wanted to start our conversation is if you could help people really understand these four different styles and how someone could self-identify which style is the style that they fall into?
David Wallin: Mm-hmm (affirmative) OK. I guess the first thing I should say just to complicate matters right from the start is that from my perspective, these four discrete categories or classifications are profoundly useful for research purposes, but I think when it comes to understanding ourselves, or as therapists when it comes to understanding the patient’s psychology or the therapist’s own psychology, I think it’s probably more meaningful to think of a kind of layering of these four attachment patterns because I think the reality is that …
I’ll talk about the attachment patterns and how they might be distinguished one from the other, but I think that the reality is that these attachment patterns are both determined in the course of our development, but they’re also context-dependent so that someone might have a secure attachment pattern in one relationship, an avoidant attachment pattern in another relationship, and a disorganized or what’s called an unresolved attachment pattern in yet another relationship.
The point is that well, it may be true that we lead with a particular pattern. I think it’s also true that whatever the context, that will tend to determine which particular pattern we are lodged in at any given time.
TS: That’s very helpful. I want to make sure, though, that I understand what you mean by this term layering.
DW: Yes, we maybe getting ahead of ourselves, but I think that it can be helpful as a therapist or as an individual trying to understand herself, himself, or other people. I think it can be helpful to keep in mind that while we all are supported by what I regard as the adaptive illusion of a singular self, I think the reality is that we all occupy multiple self-states or even selves. Again, depending on the context. Getting back to attachment patterns, I think that depending upon the particular moment and the particular relationship, there may be a particular self-state or a particular self that’s activated. If I think about myself for example, I can occupy a pretty secure state of mind with respect to attachment in certain relationships.
For example, I think in the conversation that you and I are having, Tami, I’m feeling for the moment reasonably secure. On the other hand, I think about a patient I saw this morning who made me feel quite insecure. I think the particular flavor of the insecurity might have been described as avoidant, meaning that I was pretty much up in my head avoiding my feelings, but I think it was the particular context, it was the particular quality of our interaction that activated that part of me.
I think in other contexts on what could be described as an ambivalent or the adult version of an ambivalent orientation is described as a pretty occupied state of mind with respect to attachment. And I can experience that, or I can experience in certain particularly triggering contexts what’s described as disorganized or in the adult, an unresolved state of mind with respect to attachment. Which really means unresolved with respect to trauma or loss.
Maybe this would be a good time to say something about the ways in which we can differentiate these four attachment patterns that attachment researchers initially identified in their observations of infants and later came to observe in adults. The secure pattern is one in which we’ve… You might say that there’s a balanced capacity both for autonomy on the one hand and for attachment for finding comfort in connection on the other hand.
I think the hallmark of a secure state of mind with respect to attachment is freedom or flexibility. In other words, we’ve got access to our feelings. We’ve also got access to our thoughts. We can pay attention to what’s going on in our minds. We can also pay attention to the sensation of our bodies. That’s a secure state of mind, and I think when attachment researchers identified the varieties of insecurity, they first noticed two flavors of insecurity.
The first which you’ve mentioned and I have too, an avoidant orientation and the second is an ambivalent orientation. In these insecure patterns, one sees a skew rather than seeing flexibility and balance. One sees a particular skew. In an avoidant pattern, there’s a skew away from, a drift away from attachment, away from connection or closeness and there’s a much greater comfort with autonomy, with separateness, with self-definition.
By contrast in the ambivalent pattern, sometimes called the anxious pattern, or as I mentioned what’s described in adulthood as a preoccupied pattern. There’s a skew away from self-definition, autonomy and there’s a tendency to lose the self, in deference to the other. There’s a preoccupation with connection, with the threat of the disruption of connection, and so on.
Finally, some years into the project of researching attachment, investigators discovered a fourth pattern which they described as disorganized/disoriented attachment and here, there’s an oscillation between a very, very intense preoccupation with loss and with connection and a tendency to cling and so on. That alternates with a tendency to isolate oneself to go it alone and so on.
I think there’s another way that I could talk about these, quite simply, about these four patterns and that is to say that the first pattern, the secure pattern is the inheritance from evolution. In other words, we are designed by evolution to seek the comfort, the connection to, the attachment to what the father of Attachment Theory, John Bowlby, called “stronger and/or wiser others”.
The idea was that in the course of evolution, particularly in the natural environments to which our human ancestors had to adapt, there were all sorts of threats to survival and an infant, a small child separated from a parent—a stronger and or a wiser other, an attachment figure—separated from more than a few minutes, much less than a few hours, would likely become lunch for a leopard, shall we say, so that we are programmed. It’s hardwired in human infants and for that matter, other primates to seek proximity to an attachment figure when we are threatened. That’s the primary biological attachment strategy. Each of the insecure attachment patterns reflects a different strategy.
So that in avoidant infants whose history involves experiences of being rejected by parents or highly controlled by parents. With the avoidant pattern, there is what’s called a deactivating attachment strategy. Rather than seeking the comfort of connection when freaked out, the avoidant infant really tunes out all internal and external cues that might activate the attachment behavioral system, might activate that seeking of proximity because that hasn’t worked out.
What we see in the avoidant orientation, the adult version of which is described as a dismissing state of mind with respect to attachment. In other words, dismissing of attachment, dismissing of the importance of attachment relationships. Here what we see is a blunting of awareness of internal cues that might prompt the seeking of connection.
The problem, one of the problems there is not only that in avoidant or dismissing state of mind, we wind up quite isolated from others, sometimes lonely, but in addition, this deactivating attachment strategy compels us to tune out internal experience in general. Both our own internal experience, and the internal experience of other people.
One of the hallmarks of an avoidant orientation is that we’re out of touch with our feelings. We seem to exist, as it were, from the neck up. By contrast, infants who are described as ambivalent or their adult counterparts described as preoccupied, these infants and adults have what’s called a hyperactivating attachment strategy.
These infants who as a rule have had parents who are unpredictably available—now you see them, now you don’t. They’re tuned in to the child, they’re tuned out. They’re available on the one hand and the next moment, they’re preoccupied. These infants developed what’s called a hyperactivating attachment strategy which means that there’s a constant vigilance and a tendency to amplify internal and external cues that might activate the attachment behavioral system, the seeking of proximity to attachment figures.
The idea there is that if you’ve got an unpredictably available attachment figure, then it’s a pretty good strategy to make one’s distress too conspicuous to ignore. The hallmark of an infant… an ambivalent infant or a preoccupied adult is a hyper emotionality. I think you can see that the avoidant or the dismissing adult in some ways is the polar opposite of the ambivalent or the preoccupied.
One is all about feelings. The other is all about the avoidance of feelings. One is all about connection. The other is all about the avoidance of connection and last, but not least, the disorganized infant or the adult who’s described as unresolved, meaning unresolved with respect to trauma or loss, these are folks who exhibit to what might be described as the collapse of an organized attachment strategy.
What was observed in the research on certain infants was that their behavior was chaotic, was incomprehensible, was bizarre. They don’t have an organized attachment strategy. They don’t have the secure strategy of seeking the comfort of connection when they’re freaked out. They don’t have the avoidant strategy of tuning out all internal and external cues that might prompt them to seek the comfort of connection.
They don’t have the hyper-activating strategy where they make their distress an unmistakably evident. They don’t have an organized strategy. What one sees in adults who are unresolved with respect to trauma is a kind of oscillation between extremes of avoiding other people and clinging to other people.
What one also sees in the context of situations where for example, in therapy, where their therapist might invite them to address their experiences of trauma or loss. These unresolved adults become a little loose, a little… What shall I say? Technically speaking, they manifest what are described as lapses in discourse or lapses in reasoning. Lapse in discourse might be… Well, it manifest by a patient of mine who seemed to be a solid citizen but when I asked her to talk about her relationship with her parents, her voice dropped to a spooky whisper.
TS: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
DW: That would be an example of a lapse in discourse. Suddenly, there’s a shift. A lapse in reasoning might be manifest by an… I think of another patient of mine who had the idea that his brother—who had been dead for many years—somehow had been able to sustain the belief that his brother was still alive. That’s a lapse in reasoning, because you can’t be alive and dead at the same time.
TS: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Now David, one of the things I’m curious about is you’re describing these different patterns.
DW: Yes.
TS: In your work as a psychotherapist. I’m sure you work with people who have avoidant ambivalent and unresolved attachment issues.
DW: Yup.
TS: Is your goal to try to help people move to secure attachment, would you say that’s a primary goal of how you work with people? Is that a process that takes decades? It’s a huge shift in, as you said, this leading orientation. And tell me a little bit about that first. Is that the goal, and then how do you work with people in that direction?
DW: Yes. I think that is a… What you’ve just proposed as a way of thinking about a goal in psychotherapy—to move people from insecurity to secure attachment. I think that’s certainly a meaningful goal and I think I, when I’m working with patients, I don’t articulate it to myself in exactly that way, but I do think that… I think more in terms of creating possibilities for patients.
If a patient is avoidant or dismissing—meaning among other things, avoidant of intimacy and avoidant of the world of feelings—I’m going to be trying to make greater intimacy possible and greater connection with feelings possible. The outcome, ideally, is somebody who’s more trusting, less fearful of connection, more knowledgeable about his or her internal experience of feelings and bodily sensations and so on.
I think there is a… What shall I say? A kind of unfortunate reality in psychotherapy, which is this. Psychologically speaking, there’s a way in which people who have a modicum of psychological health—people who are relatively secure—they can change, they can overcome whatever obstacles their histories have placed in their path. And they can accomplish that change much, much more quickly than somebody who is more insecure, who’s really rigidly lodged in an avoidant stance, dismissing stance, or a preoccupied stance.
In a way, and maybe it’s self-evident, but those of us who with histories of trauma I think are most—both most in need of the help that therapy can potentially afford, but in some ways, least capable of using that help. Somebody with the history of trauma, typically, in my experience, needs a longer, more intensive therapy in order to achieve their personal goals.
TS: OK, let’s look at this question of attachment from the parent’s view point and let’s talk to a new parent for the moment, a parent who is just getting ready to conceive—even before conception—and they want to be sure to raise a child with secure attachment who can take and make the most of therapy when they’re an adult, and not fall into one of these insecure categories. What would you say to those new parents?
DW: There’s an interesting few things that I would say. I think the first thing that I would say is, “Parent, heal thyself.” In other words, what seems to be the most powerful determinant of our ability to raise secure kids is our own security. One of the findings of attachment research is that the psychology of the parent tends to become, you might say, the psychology of the developing child. So secure parents tend to raise secure kids, dismissing parents tend to raise avoidant kids. Preoccupied parents raise ambivalent kids, and traumatized parents raise disorganized or traumatized kids.
That’s the pattern. I think the best a parent can do for her or his kids is to do whatever is possible to get himself or herself more together. That’s one point. The other point is this—that attachment researchers and other researchers in related fields have identified the features of the most developmentally facilitated relationships.
In other words, we now know what parents can ideally do in order to raise secure kids. I could sum it up very, very simply. Essentially, there are four qualities to the most… to the relationships that are most likely to produce secure, resilient, flexible kids. The first quality of these relationships is that the parents make maximum room for their kid’s feelings, desires, impulses, their kid’s views with regard to what’s going on. They do their best to generate maximally inclusive relationship. They made maximum room for their kid’s experience.
The second feature of these developmentally facilitated relationships is that these are relationships in which the parents recognize and repair disruptions in the relationship with their kids.
The third ingredient is that good parents upgrade the quality of communication and the relationship with their kids to higher and higher levels of complexity and awareness. The fundamental example might be that they relate to their kids in such a way that kids can learn to transition from a preverbal to a verbal world.
The fourth feature of developmentally facilitated relationships is that parents, that these good parents are willing to actively engage in struggle with their kids. This is in the department of… Providing structure in their relationship with their kids, confronting difficult problematic behavior, setting limits, saying no, all of that stuff.
These are the four key ingredients—that relationships need to be inclusive, disruptions need to be recognized and repaired, the quality of the communication needs to be upgraded, and the parent needs to be willing to really struggle and engage and confront kids and have reasonably high expectations.
TS: Now, if it’s OK, David, I’d like to ask you a personal question. You mentioned you were feeling secure in this conversation, and I’m hoping you’ll still feel that way after I ask you this question. Which is, you also mentioned that most of us have a leading attachment pattern. And I’m curious, were you raised in a situation that was secure for you or was it an insecure situation for you?
DW: It was definitely insecure. As a therapist, I think I share a history growing up that I think is a pretty average history for those of us who choose to become therapists. There’s an archetype—the famous archetype of the wounded healer, and I think that an archetype exists for a reason. I think that both for better and for worse, many therapists have backgrounds that are anything but secure.
In fact, there are a number of writers, and I’m among them, who believe that the characteristic history of someone who chooses to become a therapist really begins with the unresolved trauma of the future therapist’s parent or parents and that I mentioned just a few minutes ago that the psychology of the parent tends to become the psychology of the child.
I think when you have a parent with unresolved trauma, that parent imposes traces or more of trauma upon that parent’s kids. There’s another, apropos this characteristic history of the future or those who choose to become therapists. There’s an interesting finding of attachment research, which is that kids who at age one are assessed to be disorganized, by age four, five or six, these kids have developed an organized attachment strategy and the strategy seems to come in two flavors.
One is called controlling punitive strategy and these are kids who flip the ordinary parent-child relationship by ordering their parents around, being very angry at their parents. Then there’s a controlling caregiving strategy—because the idea here, by the way, is that if you’ve got parents who in one way or another are scary, then you have to find a way to control those parents.
It seems to me that those of us who choose to become therapists have often made use of the other variation on the controlling theme which is the controlling caregiving strategy. Here we take charge of scary parents by taking care of those parents. I think what’s true for me, and I think for many other therapists, is that in some ways, my first clinical training occurred in the context of my family. Where I learned to become a precocious emotion regulator for my rather volatile mother.
In that context—to review the parent with unresolved trauma that was my mother, could be very, very angry. That was quite traumatizing for me and then I adapted to that fear of her anger by becoming something of a mind-reader, someone who could help to control her emotions, to regulate her emotions. You might say the rudiments of therapeutic skills in the context of that first relationship and I think that that’s a very, very long answer to your question about my own attachment history.
TS: You would fall into the ambivalent pattern?
DW: No. I mean, yes and no. It’s a little bit complicated, but I think that growing up I had traces of an ambivalent pattern for sure. In other words, I was very, very concerned about maintaining at all costs the relationship with my mother who could turn angry and rejecting and all of that. That’s characteristic of an ambivalent pattern. I was very emotional and so on, but I think I also had what would be described, I’m guessing, as some disorganization in my attachment history because some of the parenting was pretty scary, was pretty… My mother’s anger could be pretty overwhelming.
TS: Well, first of all, thanks for sharing that.
DW: Sure.
TS: It leads me to a question, because I think many of us have had difficult childhoods, and part of the reason we’re interested in this kind of broadcast on attachment patterns is we’re working with our own. And trying to come into a place of greater healing and availability for intimacy and greater secure functioning. I’m curious to know, in your own healing journey, what have you found has worked for you?
DW: Yes. That’s a pretty easy question to answer and I would say three things. The first is marriage to my wonderful wife. Because I think, one of the findings actually of attachment research is that being with a relatively secure partner for… I don’t know what the research demonstrates, maybe five years, being with a relatively secure partner for five years or more can help someone with a lot of insecurity to become more secure. I think my marriage was absolutely key. I think the therapy that I’ve been in has been essential, enormously helpful. And then, last but not least, meditation has been hugely helpful over the course of the last 15 years or so.
TS: Well, let’s talk about number two and number three, therapy and meditation.
DW: OK.
TS: In terms of therapy, help me understand the process because I know this is a lot of what you teach on, how the process of therapy can help us heal our attachment wounds—when it’s effective. What makes it effective?
DW: Yes. Again, I think there’s a pretty straightforward and simple answer—which is that therapy, it seems to me, heals by providing the patient with a new and hopefully significantly better attachment relationship than the one that originally shaped the patient. I think a lot of what makes good therapy possible is the quality of the relationship that the patient has with the therapist.
And good therapy, it seems to me, has pretty much the same characteristics as a good parent-child relationship. In other words, as I mentioned before, a good parent-child relationship and I think by extension, a good therapy relationship, is one that makes maximum room for the patient’s experience. Feelings, thoughts, impulses, fantasies. Just makes room for all of that.
It’s also a relationship in which disruptions are recognized and repaired. It’s a relationship in which the quality of communication is upgraded. For example, somebody who has been able to feel, but not to think about feelings, is enabled to do that. Finally, it’s a relationship in which there’s the ability for the therapist and patient to struggle with one another. Which I think is a school for, you might say, assertiveness and healthy expressions of anger and so on.
But again, it’s all about the quality of the relationship between a particular therapist and a particular patient. Obviously, I could say a great deal more about therapy. I guess the one thing I would want to add—and this is a point that may be familiar to many of your listeners, but not all—is this that what’s sometimes called “talk therapy” really at its best is about a great deal more than talk. Because it seems to me that the relationship in therapy, like most of our relationships, if not all, unfolds, you might say, on two interweaving tracks.
There is the talk. There is the explicit, the verbal dimension of the relationship, the therapeutic dialogue or what have you, but there is also what I like to call the nonverbal subtext. And it seems to me that this nonverbal subtext which is made up of what we evoke in other people, what other people evoke in us, what we enact with other people, the implicit scenarios, mini psychodramas.
It’s also that nonverbal subtext is also expressed in the body—posture, sensation, gestures, and so forth. It seems to me that a good therapy is one that takes into account the nonverbal subtext as much as the explicit therapeutic dialogue. That’s a big part of how we get to what patients can’t or won’t put into words.
TS: Now, I do want to ask you a question about this before we move on to the third factor that you mentioned in your healing process—meditation. Which is you’re talking about the therapeutic relationship being healing in and of itself and the therapist in a sense potentially.
DW: Potentially.
TS: Potentially, having that potential, and that in a sense, the therapist is providing a kind of healthy re-parenting that didn’t exist.
DW:Right.
TS: For whatever reason, I’m imaging someone going to a therapist. She’s like 20 years younger than them and thinking, “How’s that going to work? Is it really that the right analogy, re-parenting? I don’t see this person as my parent.”
DW: Yes. Yes. I think that’s an interesting question. I’ve never personally had the experience of being with a much younger therapist, but it seems to me that in a way, the key is not so much, you might say re-parenting, it’s more like having a new experience of a relationship in which one is looking to another for help.
In other words, it’s having a new attachment relationship and it seems to me that it’s possible to have a new attachment relationship with somebody who’s older, somebody who’s younger, somebody who’s the same age. As Bowlby said, an attachment figure is someone who we regard as “stronger and/or wiser,” doesn’t necessarily have to be older.
TS: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s almost like you’re rewiring, if you will, that capacity to seek shelter in someone who’s stronger and wiser and to feel like you’re getting the shelter that you need.
DW: Yes. I think that’s apt, but I think in some ways, the point is not only to get the security and the shelter, as you put it, of a new attachment relationship. The point is also to have a relationship in which as many of the facets of who we are as people which maybe couldn’t be safely expressed in our relationship with our original attachment figures—our parents—in which there’s room for all of those multiple facets of us.
Our dependency, but also our autonomy, our deep feelings, but also our deep thoughts. The idea again is a healing relationship in therapy, just like a good a parent-child relationship, is one in which there’s maximum room for experience.
TS: OK, and then I also wanted to ask you a question about this nonverbal subtext that’s happening in the psychotherapeutic encounter. And I’m wondering if you could give me an example of how you work with that? Just something that comes up pretty regularly.
DW: Sure. Sure. I guess the example that comes to mind is this. I have a patient who I’ve been seeing for several years, and the patient had made significant progress and in a given, in a particular session, I noticed that … Well, let’s put it this way. I had come to feel that the patient was someone who had a very, very difficult time being “real”. Or put a little differently, this was a young woman who had difficulty taking herself seriously.
I was finding myself in the therapy sessions feeling that our connection and what we were focusing on together, it was just a bit more superficial that it needed to be. I was pretty determined to find a way to understand more about why the relationship between me and this young woman seemed to have this particular quality. Anyway, in a particular session, I noticed that virtually every time she said something serious, virtually every time she expressed a feeling, that there would follow some nervous laughter.
It’s nonverbal. This isn’t her words. If you looked at the dialogue alone, like a transcript of the session, you wouldn’t be aware of this. I said to her at a certain point, “You know, I don’t mean to be critical when I make this observation, but I’m noticing that virtually every time you say anything that’s serious or full of feeling that you follow with this kind of nervous laughter.”
She said something like, “David.” Oh no, I didn’t use the word nervous laughter. I think I just used the… I said, “You smile or you laugh.” And then she said, when I pointed this out, she said, “David, it’s called ‘nervous laughter’. Everybody does that.” And I said, “Well, but, you know, I’m not talking about everybody, I’m talking about you.” But then I went on to say, “You know, I’m aware that I too will laugh at times when I say something serious.”
I said, “You know, I’m also aware that my brother could be pretty irritating to me because it was almost like a tick that every time he said anything that was serious, it would be accompanied by this nervous laughter.”
Anyway, we explored that together. And she became aware—or rather we became aware together—that there were particular experiences she had growing up, particular experiences I had growing up that led to the conviction that it just wasn’t safe to be real. It wasn’t safe to have feelings. You had to protect yourself by, in a sense, expressing yourself and then taking it back or nullifying it or undoing it with a laugh.
As I was talking to her about this, as we were talking about it together, I found myself becoming tearful as I thought about my own experience, as I thought about her experience. It just seemed sad that each of us would have had to adapt to our growing up in this particular way. She was very moved at the fact that I was moved and I remember that soon after the session, I got an email from her that talked about the power of that session, how I had succeeded in making her aware of something she was utterly oblivious to.
She said that in some ways, what was most important was the fact that I was visibly moved by her experience, by my own experience. She felt profoundly accepted and I remember these words—she said, “Tears speak louder than words.”
TS: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
DW: Yes. Yes. All of that is, I hope, evocative of what I mean by the nonverbal subtext.
TS: Yes. OK, and I really want to ask you about this third healing force in changing your attachment style and moving it in a direction of security. Meditation. I think of meditation as something you do by yourself, not relational in the way that marriage and therapy are so I’m curious how you feel it’s helped you heal your attachment wounding.
DW: Yes. Yes. It’s interesting just that that one point you make that meditation is solitary. That’s true and it’s not true. There’s two senses in which it’s not true. The first is that in Buddhism, they talk about the most powerful spiritual resources as being the Buddha, and then the dharma which is what the Buddha taught, and the sangha which is the group of meditators.
Many of us who meditate also participate in meditation in other than a solitary context. My sangha happens to be a sangha of two because my wife and I meditate together. And I think there’s another sense in which meditation is not all about a single person and I guess what I’m… Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but what I’m thinking is that meditation involves, you might say, two parts of the self.
You might say it’s an internal relationship between the witness, the watcher and what is watched or witnessed. In other words, I am paying attention in the role of the witness to the thoughts that arise, the feelings that arise, the rising and falling of my belly with my inhalation and exhalation. There’s that relational aspect even to solitary meditation, but in terms of… Maybe you can refresh my memory about the question… Were you asking how meditation, how I look at that as a healing process?
TS: How meditation has helped you in shifting the attachment patterning in your life?
DW: Yes. My hunch is that it’s more complicated than this, but there’s a lot that I… There’s multiple ways in which I have benefited and continued to benefit from meditation, such that I think of it not only as a spiritual practice in some ways, but also as a therapeutic practice. What I have in mind are two things in particular. One is that I think what I and what many people learn in the process of meditating is that our minds are not entirely out of our control.
For many years in my life, I was troubled by intrusive thoughts, troubling fantasies, difficult memories, and I would regularly feel as though when these thoughts, memories, fantasies arose, I had no choice but to fold. I had no choice but to submit, you might say, to the difficulty associated with these thoughts, feelings, memories, fantasies, and so on.
What meditation has taught me is that there’s a way in which I actually have more control over my mind, what I choose to think of, what I choose to pay attention to. You could look at meditation as a kind of process of going to the gym for the mind, and the muscles that you strengthen are the muscles of focus, attention and so on.
That’s one way in which meditation has really strengthened my sense of being in charge of myself, being, you might say, an agent who makes things happen including things in my own mind. I think the other and maybe even more important way in which meditation has been therapeutic for me, in which I think meditation is therapeutic for many, many people is that meditation is emotion-regulating.
It’s not an unfamiliar experience. In fact, it’s an almost predictable, reliable experience for me to sit down for a period of meditation feeling anxious, distressed, low and by the time I’ve meditated for 20, 30, 40 minutes, I come out of it in an entirely different state of mind in which those difficult emotions are more regulated, you might say. I feel more grounded, more centered, less beset with difficult emotion.
TS: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Now, David, I asked you in your own life story, how have you worked with your own difficult early patterning and you gave this triple header strong answer and I can see them all working together in meditation, therapy, and your long-term marriage. I did want to ask you a question though about your marriage which is you talked about the power, about your marriage, the power of being in a relationship with someone who has a level of secure attachment and my question is for those of us who had difficult childhoods, can we marry up? Can we find that person with a more secure attachment and be seen as attractive to them? Does that work?
DW: Can you marry up? I think that’s possible for sure, but I guess I wouldn’t… I don’t even think of it quite in those terms. I think about making a good choice, given who you are as a person and what you’ve experienced in the course of your history and what your particular needs are. For example, I think what’s been true in my marriage, but also for that matter in my therapy—the most significant therapy relationship that I’ve had—is that both of these relationships were with women who were in some sense the anti-mother.
In other words, my mother was highly volatile, prone to anger, had an impossible time looking at herself. Both in therapy and in my marriage, I think I had the internal wisdom, the unconscious wisdom to make a choice to be with someone who is not volatile, not angry, who was capable of looking at herself and I think that in a way that willingness to look at oneself, that’s seems to me utterly central. Absolutely critical.
Whether we’re talking about a therapist or a marriage partner, the ability to look at oneself, to consider why one does what one does, to consider the impact of what one does on other people, in a sense, that’s a reflection of security. And at the same time, it just so happens that my wife’s own history was quite problematic, but she managed by virtue of her experiences, I think largely, probably in therapy, to come out on the other… To some extent, on the other side of those difficult experiences.
TS: OK David, just one final question. This whole topic of healing our early attachment wounding has been… It’s a really, really, really, underline the word really, important topic to me, to me personally, in my own heart-opening process as a person. What I’d love to just hear as a final note here from you is: why this topic has become so important to you and really the focus of a lot of your writing and teaching?
DW: Yes. Yes. I think it has everything to do with my own history. In other words, having come from a somewhat wounding set of original relationships, particularly with my mother. I think I’ve long been motivated to find a way through that particular labyrinth. In other words, I think I’ve known from the time that I was very young that I had some work to do.
There’s a way in which when I studied psychotherapy… For example, when I was in graduate school, in writing a PhD dissertation, my first choice was to write a dissertation about so-called “master therapists” and the idea was to somehow learn from someone who was highly expert exactly what was it in a therapy relationship that could allow people to change.
Ultimately, I was looking to change myself, but I think along the way, I’ve gotten very, very interested in what might be beneficial about psychotherapy and for that matter of meditation, not only for myself, but for my patients, and all of those readers who have found my book. My goal is to… As a therapist, as a writer, as a friend, as a marriage partner, my goal in some ways is to help other people to be more fully themselves, to suffer less, and so on.
TS: David, I want to thank you so much for this honest and illuminating conversation. Thank you.
DW: OK, it was my pleasure.
TS: I’ve been speaking with David Wallin. He’s the author of the classic book Attachment In Psychotherapy and with Sounds True, he is teaching an eight-week online course that begins on September 11th of this year and of it’s called Attachment in the Practice of Psychotherapy: Relational Transformation, Nonverbal Experience, and the Psychology of the Therapist.
I think certainly, David, something I have learned from your work is that for a therapist to heal their own attachment wounding and to work on that and to be aware of it is so important. I certainly can highly recommend for all of the practicing clinicians out there the value of this training. Thank you so much, David.
DW: Well, thank you.
TS:Soundstrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
