Inner attachment and curiosity

Trisha Wolfe: Hello and welcome. We’re just getting started. I just started the recording and so if you are here and you don’t want to be on the recording, you are more than welcome to turn off your camera and you can ask any question you would like in the chat and I’ll just read it out to the group. But thanks so much for joining whether you’re here live or watching the recording for a little group meeting where we can talk about the book we’re reading. Are you mad at me? all about fawning and people pleasing. Of course, I’m happy to answer questions about books from the past book clubs too. More general questions you have. I am really enjoying this book. You know, some of the books we’ve read have been quite academic. You know, just coming off unlocking the emotional brain, which I love, but is a quite heavy academic text. It’s really nice to read this one, too, which I think does a great job of taking these really complex ideas and putting them into simpler, easy to apply methods.

00:01:08

Trisha Wolfe: So, it’s nice to have a little mix. You know, we read healing developmental trauma, which is more academic, no bad parts, which is a little more for the individual. Adult children of emotionally immature parents, same for the individual, and then unlocking the emotional brain. Back to Are You Mad at Me? So, we’ve really gotten to have quite a wide variety, which is so much fun. I do have a question someone sent in that I’m going to discuss, but since you’re here live, are there any questions any of you have? And again, you’re welcome to put it in the chat or just ask it with your video off or whatever you would like to do. But since you’re here, I would love to answer any questions you might have. And there’s no pressure. Okay. Well, if questions come up as we go, you’re more than welcome to ask them. Usually, this time is a time for me to answer a question. So, I can always talk a little bit about the book if I’d like, but please feel free to ask anything.

00:02:13

Trisha Wolfe: It doesn’t have to be related to this book. But the question that we had that someone was talking about from the most recent episode where I was talking about this idea of if you remember chapter 4 was about you are not your thoughts. So it was about noticing this inner voice and talking about some of these ways that we can start to observe for example the inner critic and challenge our perception and kind of not be as fearful about our thoughts. And then moving to soothing and labeling what’s happening. And you might remember Meg uses an acronym called nicer. And nicer stands for notice, invite, curiosity, embrace, and return. So she uses this throughout the book. And this is her process of observing. So first starting with noticing, right? Maybe you’re noticing that you’re overthinking. Then you invite, meaning you let the experience be there. For many of us who have a history of attachment failures and developmental ruptures, we might get scared and want to push away the experience, which makes a lot of sense.

00:03:18

Trisha Wolfe: But eventually, we get to a place where we can allow the thoughts, the feelings, the body sensations to be there. We bring in some curiosity and we might notice what part of us has been activated, what feeling is here. Can I put a label on this? that we embrace, you know, we bring that part of us in and then we return to the present, whether that’s feeling the seat underneath of us or looking around us. So, I was talking about in the episode this idea of inner attachment, you know, of how we can give ourselves transformational experiences with how we relate to ourselves rather than trying to counteract ourselves. So, just to refresh your memory, counteractive strategies are things that are managerial. They are often behavioral, whether it’s trying to manage our behaviors themselves or manage our cognitions or manage our emotions. And they have a time and a place, right? When we’re doing this depth work where we’re working on some of these deeper patterns, we need usually to have some counteractive tools for stabilization, which might mean settling ourselves back down, which might mean feeling the chair underneath of us, which might mean learning how to challenge our thoughts.

00:04:26

Trisha Wolfe: But all those things are counteractive, meaning they’re trying to go against a predictive pattern that the brain has. So the brain is predicting if I feel my feelings, people will not love me and they will pull away from me. And so if we notice that happening and we might say, “Hey, you’re allowed to have feelings. It’s okay. Let’s sit with the feeling.” That’s attempting to counteract, that’s attempting to show the brain like, “This isn’t true. You can do this anyway.” And there’s a time and a place. But we’re also curious about transformational experiences of getting to the root of that predictive patterning, getting to the implicit emotional learning. If you remember from a mocking the emotional brain so that we can update that through memory reconsolidation. So in are you mad at me? There’s a mix of counteractive techniques and transformational techniques. And what I was talking about is we don’t always have to have a good external response for it to be a new experience for the brain. For it to be an experience that can update old learnings.

00:05:28

Trisha Wolfe: So the example I always kind of use is if you go you go get a coffee and you see the barista has made your drink with cow’s milk. You can’t have cow’s milk. You ordered it with oat milk. The idea would be, well, this is a great time to try on having needs, having boundaries. You can let the barista know that they didn’t make your drink correctly. They’ll update it. All will be fine. Well, we can’t promise that. First of all, we don’t know if the barista might be having a horrible day and might yell at you or kick you out or whatever it is. But more importantly, the response of the barista isn’t required for it to update a learning in our brain. Because if we go in and we say, “Hey, sorry. I can’t have cow’s milk. I asked for oat milk.” And the barista says, “How dare you speak to me that way? Get out of here.” It can still be a new experience for parts of us who feel

00:06:17

Trisha Wolfe: we’re not afraid to have needs when it comes to how we relate to ourselves, how we observe the experience. So if we leave of this this barista kind of going off on us when we tried to have a simple meal of a drink we paid for, we might start to go into like, see, you can never get it right. you really can’t ask for what you need because everyone’s just going to attack you or you must not have asked for it in the right way. This is why you shouldn’t even try. You always mess everything up. And that’s part of the learning, right? Having needs means people will get upset at me. People get upset at me because I’m too much. Kind of becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy. But the way we can be curious about implementing this observation that Meg is talking about and you’ve heard me talk about quite a bit is to notice what’s happening and then to get curious with ourselves of how we relate to and treat ourselves. If we start going down the like you always mess everything up train, we can pause and we can say, “Hey, this really sucks. That barista was really rude and I really don’t feel very good right now.

00:07:21

Trisha Wolfe: That was a really hurtful experience for me and I actually am allowed to have my needs I think but more importantly I can be with what I’m feeling right now which is sad and confused and angry and hurt and just noticing the feeling and letting ourselves be in that experience. So even though the other person didn’t say of course you’re allowed to have means I’ll fix your drink. We can still be with like, wow, that did not go the way I liked and I’m allowed to be upset with the way it went, but my life isn’t in danger. My primary relationships are not in danger. I’m not going to be voted off the island. That’s really the experience we’re trying to give our brain because now the primary attachment relationship is not with our caregivers, our partners, whoever it is. It’s us to us. So when I was talking about this inner attachment, there was a question about these interactions and how sometimes the way we treat ourselves can be soothing or transformational or counteractive. And so this person asked, “In your experience, have those genuinely soothing interactions created a mismatch experience for those parts? Does just being met with genuine love and attention allow any part no matter the

00:08:34

Trisha Wolfe: manifestation to have a corrective experience? So this is a great question and the answer is sort of like it’s not that simple but also yes. When I think about doing this work with individuals the way we treat ourselves and our inner attachment is foundational to the work. So whatever parts we identify and remember what do we mean by parts? We mean schemas, we mean survival strategies, we mean implicit emotional learnings. Really, what we mean is a bundle of predictive patterns in our brain. So, no matter what part you’re dealing with, intellectualizer, people pleaser, perfectionist, critic, etc. Part of the foundational experience of how we update that learning is us learning to observe and respond to that part of us. Because so often when we’re trying to manage ourselves, for example, if we try to say like, “Oh, well, you just feel anxious about that. You don’t need to overthink it.” Now, stop overthinking. You know, look around the room, name three things you see, go distract yourself, whatever. Again, there’s a time and a place for that.

00:09:43

Trisha Wolfe: But what we’re doing is we’re trying to push that part of us away. We’re trying to manage that part and say, “You shouldn’t be feeling this way right now. Everything’s fine. You shouldn’t be thinking this way right now. Everything’s fine. We need to manage ourselves.” But what’s really underneath is turning and looking at like how do you feel about this part of you, this experience you have where you get anxious and you overthink things. What feeling might be underneath of there? What did you learn about treating yourself when you’re scared or anxious? How did your parents, your teachers, etc. treat you when you were scared and anxious? How have partners and friends in your adult life treated you when you were scared and anxious or hurt? Because what we’re really curious about is if we can explore and play around with how we treat ourselves, then that goes into the world when we’re interacting with other people because we can never promise ourselves that the outcome we get from the world will be the good outcome.

00:10:40

Trisha Wolfe: So many times when people hear this idea that like you need new experiences to update your nervous system, they want to jump to taking action. They want to say, “Okay, I need a new experience. Then I’m just going to go set this need. I’m going to go reach out to this person. I’m going to set a boundary. I’m going to make myself do the scary thing.” Again, there’s a time and a place for exposing ourselves to the scary thing. But you’re jumping to the action before you’ve done the work to identify what learning are you even trying to address. What part of you is even popping up in these moments? What emotion, body, sensation, story does that part of you hold? and how do you respond to and treat that part of you? So, is it entirely internal? Like we can just completely update all of our learnings from the way we teach ourselves. Well, no, because we’re in the world and so we’re always interacting with the world.

00:11:32

Trisha Wolfe: And yes, of course, part of it is connecting with ourselves so that we can connect to others. But I do view that internal mismatch experience as the foundation. And it’s very often a safe place to start when we’re told we have to heal in community and connection. So you have to go out and find people who can give that to you. It’s correct. We are made to be in connection. We are pack animals. We are made to have connection and community. But when all of your trauma centers around attachment and relational connection, you usually don’t even have a strong connection to yourself. And so when you go to try to seek these interactions with others, you will go into the criticism, the overanalyzing, the anxiety, the fear, the panic because you have not yet developed the new lenses to even see relationships as safe. So, I hope that helps understand that like these internal mismatch experiences are necessary and often the best place to start because no one else is involved.

00:12:39

Trisha Wolfe: We do want to move to having other people involved, but other people are very unpredictable. We can usually gather enough data about ourselves to start to learn to predict what’s going to come, the prediction our brain is making and how we want to be responded to. It stacks, right? Because if part of what we want is for someone to be there with us when we’re anxious. We never got that. We yearn for this connection, this protective energy, etc., then us learning how to give that to ourselves by being compassionate sounds good. You might think the mismatch experience is us being compassionate to ourselves. But it can start to stack and we can say, well, being compassionate to myself brings up another learning which says, I can’t be kind to myself because I’m actually secretly a very bad human. and if I’m kind to myself, I won’t be trying so hard all the time and everyone will find out that I’m bad. So, we we kind of find one learning and then it pings pongs to another learning and we’re almost looking for what is the most accessible place to start.

00:13:36

Trisha Wolfe: So, when we read about this idea of being compassionate toward the critic, yes, love it. That’s an internal mismatch experience. But is it even safe to be compassionate toward yourself? Is the critic a loadbearing wall, quote unquote, in your survival system? Is it something you learned you had to do to be safe and alive in the world? Then self-compassion becomes a counteractive tool. It becomes you trying to go against your brain’s survival system. Please know that I am not anti-self-compassion. I’m incredibly pro self-compassion. But we can’t start with self-compassion and assume that it’s just a learnable skill. Self-compassion can be learned like any other behavior. But if it’s counteracting a predictive survival learning that says I have to maintain my attachment by criticizing myself all the time so that no one finds out I’m a bad person, for example, then you have to work with that before you could ever like you you have to even consider the possibility of neutrality before you would ever be able to move towards self-compassion.

00:14:38

Trisha Wolfe: That’s why when you see people with this very strong inner critic and they and their intellectualizers, they know everything about self-compassion. They even say it to themselves. They can say all the words. They sound super adult. You know, they sit in their self-compassion meditation, but they don’t see a change. When push comes to shove, they will go back to criticizing themselves. That’s because you’re not getting at the core. Right? So, you know me, I love a long-winded answer, but that’s kind of my long- winded answer to why internal experiences are key. And we don’t need to worry too much about the tools. The tools come later. You’ll be ready for self-compassion the moment you feel compassionate towards yourself, if that makes sense. Like the first moment you consider that maybe possibly potentially you’re not a bad person at your core, but you lived in an environment where you had to be responsible for everyone else’s experiences. Maybe just that moment of noticing that and saying, “Whoa, maybe that is possible.” That’s your first little drop of self-compassion.

00:15:39

Trisha Wolfe: It doesn’t have to be this like I honor my inner critic and I love this part of me. If that resonates with you and it genuinely sinks through the layers and feels good, that’s amazing. But what we have to be so careful with, especially if you’re here because you like my Intellectualizer content, child consciousnesses can walk like an adult and talk like an adult, but they are not adult. They are not embodied. So we can say the words of compassion, of presence, of curiosity, of noticing. But when you say it, you have to pause and notice. How does it really feel when I say this to myself? How does it really feel when I sink through the layers? Because cognitively you might love self-compassion and eat it up because you know it’s the good or right thing to do. And some part of your brain might believe it’s true. But again, those deep implicit emotional learnings, if we sit with it for a moment, will come up and say, “Well, no, you’re not allowed to do that.” And now I’m going to make you really numb and go take on another project or now I’m going to make

00:16:42

Trisha Wolfe: you scroll on your phone for 9 hours or whatever the brain does to protect us. Yeah. So that’s why, you know, as Meg is talking here about observing ourselves, and you know, with these books, they’re short, right? So they have to put a lot of information in a short period of time. what she’s done here in chapter 4, what she’s laid out here could be the work of years and that would be totally normal if you had developmental trauma. It’s not hopeless. All of those years will have steps forward. But I just want you to understand the reality of working with some of these learnings. Now, when we can get to the root of the learning, you might remember from unlocking the emotional brain, they can reorganize quite quickly. But when you really have grown up in developmental trauma, it’s like a big tangled web of yarn. So when you pull one learning, another learning pulls, right? They’re all tangled up within there. So that’s why we might not see that kind of spontaneous updating magic that we read in some of the cases of unlocking the emotional brain and why we always always always come back to that observing the metacognition.

00:17:43

Trisha Wolfe: If you’ve listened to all five or six books with me, you’re like, is she going to talk about observing again? Yeah, because it’s like the number one thing. and and it’s such important work to tease apart true observation with this analytical intellectualizer part that sounds adult and can say all the right words. So that’s really my challenge and curiosity for you. You know when you get to this section at the end here about nicer where if you want to try this on try it on more as an experiment rather than as a thing you must carry out. Right? So when you notice that your mind starts spiraling and you’re overthinking, just noticing that that could be as far as you get. What happens when you notice that? What is your instinct to do in that moment? How do you feel toward yourself? How do you feel about the world? What emotion is happening? How does your body feel? What is the next impulsive behavior you want to take?

00:18:40

Trisha Wolfe: What feels right about overthinking and ruminating? What does it feel like would happen if you woke up tomorrow and you could never ever ruminate or overthink again? We turned off the gene. Wait for the part of you that’s like, “Yes, yes, that’s what I’m dreaming of.” And then let it sink through the layers and wait for the part of you that’s like, “That would be so dangerous. I would miss something. I would get hurt or someone I love would get hurt or everyone would find out that I’m secretly this bad, horrible person. Whatever it is, that’s enough. That’s the process of this internal attachment. I don’t think I’ve talked about this in the book club yet, but I’ve been talking a little bit on Instagram and Tik Tok about what it’s like to grow up with parents who love you as best they can, but were never curious about your internal world. So, they might say, “How was school?” or they might, you know, take you to your soccer games, but they never really were curious about your emotions, your hopes, your dreams, what was happening inside of you, how it felt when X thing happened, how it felt when your friend moved away, etc. And that can happen with parents who are stressed, who don’t have enough money, who are emotionally immature, who have their own trauma.

00:19:49

Trisha Wolfe: And then you never learn that it’s safe to be curious about your internal world. And so that’s part of this, too. This inner attachment update is really learning to be curious about yourself rather than manage yourself. And so that’s why I say with this book and with every book, whatever the tools are that are being introduced, we put them in our toolbox of experiments of curiosities rather than things we must implement. Right? If you need counteractive tools, use counteractive tools. But don’t lose sight of the relationship to yourself, the curiosity about your experience, and getting more to the root of how all of your behaviors are solutions to some deeper experience. So, that was a wow, I really made that answer last 20 minutes. So, that was a very in-depth answer to that question, but I think it’s it’s really nuanced and so much therapeutic content online because we’re trying to make it as accessible as possible doesn’t have room for nuance. In a 90-cond TikTok, there’s not room to understand this kind of nuance.