Emotional Regulation in Adulthood
Emotional regulation is a necessary skill for secure attachment. In other words, people who are a "hot mess" have difficulty feeling secure about themselves or having good relationships with others.\xa0
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/head-games/202206/how-become-more-secure-person\xa0
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Transcript:
you're listening to psych with mike for more episodes or to connect with the show with comments ideas or to be a 0:06 guest go to www.cyclicmike.com follow the show on twitter at psych with 0:13 mike or like the facebook page at psych with mike now here's psych with mike 0:20 welcome to the site with mike library this is dr michael mohan i'm here with mr brett newcomb and intern michael 0:25 hello hello how are you gentlemen doing doing well i i asked if we were ready and the response i got did not seem 0:32 overly enthusiastic ho-hum is a response it is a response sometimes no news is good news uh that's 0:40 yeah that's what they say no news is good news so uh 0:46 this is uh a subject that i find compelling i'm not sure the rest of the room finds 0:53 it compelling is that fair to say interesting uh i i don't know how compelling it 0:58 needs to be to to talk about it uh what what are you talking about 1:04 what are we talking about uh my i told you this morning when you got 1:10 here that i did something that i never do which is i actually listened to an 1:15 episode of psych with mike and i listened to the episode that i 1:20 posted today which is friday the 8th of july for anybody keeping track at home 1:29 and in that show we had michelle stieg here who you had brought 1:37 with you a couple of weeks ago and uh we were talking about theoretical orientation and i was saying that you 1:45 know my theoretical orientation comes from the psychodynamic perspective and 1:50 heinz kohut and the development of 1:55 parenting models which leads to attachment and i have talked about piaget's original stage of 2:03 development which is trust versus mistrust and it's just so 2:08 uh that is so much the foundation of how i understand human psychology that when i 2:16 think about doing therapy and i think about people who have had challenges in their sense 2:23 of security and in their attachment styles the question becomes as an adult 2:30 what can you do about that let's assume that this underlying 2:36 theory of psychology that i subscribe to is cogent that it makes sense that it's 2:42 accurate and you have struggles with those early 2:47 years in those early relationships as a lot of us have brett you and i know that we talk about that all the time we don't 2:53 know as much about michael's relationship with his primary caregivers as an infant but we know that you and i 3:00 really struggled with that and so as adults we've had to learn compensatory 3:05 behaviors or whatever compensatory abilities to be able to be 3:13 in attached relationships and to feel more secure and so how do you give that 3:18 to somebody in therapy that's that's really kind of my my focus 3:26 so you are questioning whether or not 3:31 atypical if there is such a thing client coming in for the first time that you don't know 3:37 whatever their presenting uh issue or reason for being there is is in all likelihood suffering from some 3:45 kind of attachment disorder suffered from childhood 3:50 distress or trauma is that is that what your postulate 3:59 i think i would agree with that that that that's an accurate 4:05 encapsulation yeah and capitulization of what's going on in therapy yeah and i 4:10 think a lot of therapy if it's successful involves re-parenting 4:15 that wounded inner child whether that's the individual learns how to reparent 4:21 themselves or whether you model and demonstrate for them how to re-parent themselves i think if the 4:28 therapy is beneficial and successful it will involve re-parenting some of 4:33 those scripts that are wounded in broken scripts that we carry around inside ourselves yeah i remember when i was in 4:40 graduate school i don't know if you knew this at the time but 4:46 uh people talk about inner child and and back in the uh in the mid 90s when i was 4:51 actually in grad school uh it was a buzz it was like absolutely and i used to say all the time the only 4:58 thing that i want from my inner child is his skittles and then i'm going to kick his ass 5:04 you know and because i didn't want to hear that kind of language it felt 5:12 i mean i it felt offensive to me and what i realized later was not because that's not true 5:20 or accurate but because i wasn't ready you were too resisting yeah yeah i 5:25 was resisting it big time um and so i think that that that that we 5:30 look at things like internal family systems right where when we ignore or suppress those inner children or 5:37 whatever parts of us that they are they really show up in other places in our life yeah and in ways that we didn't 5:44 necessarily absolutely yeah absolutely i think that's the central premise of ifs yeah yeah 5:50 and listen to your parts and be aware of their existence and i don't know if you've seen the episodes that we've done 5:56 with michelle but she is an ifs therapist and so that was exactly the 6:02 conversation that we were having and you know brett and i have always been i think brett's more open to it now i'm 6:09 still less open to it the idea of ifs which i don't for me it's a it's a 6:15 descriptor you have to find a language that you and your client can share yeah so one of the challenges of being a 6:21 therapist is to listen to the language that the client uses so that you can 6:27 do appropriate feedback and and reflective listening in a way that demonstrates that you hear 6:34 them accurately uh so if i have a client who's a truck driver 6:39 and i can do it appropriately i try to use driving analogies as often as i can because it's like what you experience if 6:46 i have a client's computer programmer i'll use computer examples whatever i can do if i can do it if i 6:53 can't do it then i say you have to educate me i don't know teach me your language but i listen and 6:58 some of it is neuro-linguistic programming you hear the things they say 7:04 and you can determine the way they experience the world if they do it visually if they do it orally if they do 7:09 it tactically and that helps you then speak in the rhythm that they can hear so i think 7:15 that's a critical component i think ifs also offers that language too because children talk about 7:22 this idea that oh there's a part of me that got angry and so it's really easy to latch on to that apart oh let's talk 7:29 about this part and not take ownership of the whole thing that was just a part a minute and it reminds me of um uh you 7:35 talk about it's just another frame or another language or another structure on top of some very good very old ideas it 7:42 reminds me of you know gestalt's uh empty chair technique where we 7:48 set somebody down and we say what would you say to yourself but now instead of talking to your whole self maybe you're just talking to one part of yourself 7:54 absolutely and if you've ever had an opportunity to experience that literally making them move from one 8:01 chair to the other yeah is an essential component of that technique they they sit in one chair and 8:08 they say what their mother said then they sit in their chair and say what they would say right if their mother 8:14 could hear them if you're if you're saying you want to your mother even if she's dead 8:19 and she could hear you and understand you what would you say give yourself permission say it out loud then get back 8:25 in the chair and so the you facilitate that conversation but they do all the work yeah they have all the conversation 8:31 they generate all the concepts but let's not gloss over the technique it's super 8:37 super important that they change chairs oh absolutely because psychologically they change they shift the viewpoint and 8:44 and you don't have to understand why that happens as a therapist but you got to understand to try and ask them to 8:51 remain in the same chair and have that dualistic kind of 8:57 message going on in their brain is extremely difficult which one you can't do therapy with yourself you need another what what you hate 9:04 you can't do therapy with yourself and therein lies the rub [Laughter] 9:11 well even the article talks about this idea of when you're making interpersonal changes making peace with the past 9:18 they quote one participant is saying that she was able to observe 9:24 something that happened in her past and become aware of it so we're talking about how do we inch towards security 9:31 and how do we how do we progress towards that idea of the secure attachments and awareness i think is what we're 9:37 really touching on being critically aware of all of these things that got you to the place that you are 9:43 and then being able to critically ask yourself what do i like what don't i like what do i just have to live with 9:51 and because they said it doesn't make it so correct uh i was told you're too 9:56 stupid to go to college 10:02 so okay also the article the article talks about in the process of doing that this individual was able 10:08 to reframe her understanding and compassion for her mother who had 10:13 been pretty traumatizing for reasons that she now had a better uh grasp on 10:20 which helped her reframe the dance between she and her mother 10:26 and you know that i'm like in a real young phase right now i'm reading all of 10:32 young stuff and everything and so that's kind of my where my focus is and one of the things 10:38 that i am really starting to realize 10:44 and i'm going to go off track here because i'm building a clock uh you know you talk about all the time 10:49 um whose perspective is it that you can't uh uh 10:55 kernberg's idea that you can't really address your 11:00 whatever they are bipolar or narcissistic or whatever personality issues until in your 50s or later late 11:07 40s early 50s and i am so in that vein right now because i've been doing all of 11:12 this study with jung and one of the things that i'm recognizing is this idea 11:18 of trying to embrace the shadow and so you know this and michael you probably may or may not know this but i'm blind 11:24 in my left eye and it doesn't always track with my right eye when i tell 11:29 people this the first time most people say oh i never knew that i never and and it's amazing to me how little other 11:37 people but people don't really pay attention to their environment and and so it's amazing to me how much people will say 11:44 oh i never knew that because it's been such a my retina detached when i was in high 11:50 school playing football it was the end of my football career and if i tell people this it makes me 11:57 seem very sympathetic to most people right to me it's something that is 12:03 embarrassing and shameful and i've always tried to hide it so it's been a part of my shadow and so i've really 12:09 been trying to work on embracing that but that to me that's what young's 12:17 so what jung talks about in the shadow and the persona and the self is really 12:23 an aspect of ifs sure yeah and and i know i only just now 12:30 made that comparison because we've been talking to michelle and there's nothing new under this 12:36 there's nothing new under the sun yeah it's amazing but so when we're talking about the inner 12:41 child what seems to me to be the clinical 12:47 focus would be how do i help you brett or you michael 12:53 identify what are those pieces of your wounded 12:58 child that you live with or try and hide and how can i help you to embrace that 13:06 not so that you can resolve the trauma but so that you can live with it without 13:13 fear insecurity or shame so i think one of the ways that a therapist does that is to begin with 13:22 what carl rogers called unconditional positive regard i 13:27 want to say to you that i hear what you are saying and i 13:33 honor you for surviving whatever your experience was nothing shameful or 13:38 disgusting or horrible or evil or wicked in what you did to survive 13:43 however you managed it you got here how you got here today is 13:49 not on you that's on others and the adults in your life in particular how you leave here is on you and what i can 13:57 offer you is the the promise that if we do this work properly you will leave here 14:05 with more power and more control than you've ever had yeah at 14:10 hearing the voice from among those voices inside you that you want to hear that you need to hear 14:17 so if you will talk to me and you will trust the process what you'll see is that i absolutely 14:24 accept and honor who you are and how you got here especially those that have had 14:31 severe and chronic abuse experiences in right life who were shamed 14:36 and threatened and punished because of that to say to them you don't have to be in 14:42 touch with that part of that any longer than you want to you don't need it anymore to survive you survived to this 14:48 point let's talk about what you need to go out of here and be able not necessarily to get rid of that but to 14:54 put it back in the bag and keep it so that you can take it out if you want to so let's go to our break and then when 14:59 we come back i really like the language that you're using here and so i want to ask you a question about that but let's 15:04 go to our break and i'll do that on the other side all right hey everybody dr michael mahon here from site with mike and i couldn't be more 15:12 excited to talk to you about athletic greens which is a new sponsor we have here on the show 15:17 i started taking athletic greens watching some youtube videos and doing my own 15:22 research i wanted to add something to my daily workout program to give me some energy and to support gut health and 15:30 that was the one thing that kept coming up again and again with athletic greens is the guy who started the company 15:36 did a bunch of research because he was having some gut health issues that he couldn't get any resolution for he 15:43 developed athletic greens and it's just exploded from there so it's 75 15:49 superfoods vitamins minerals probiotics whole foods sources that's all in one 15:56 daily scoop you put it in 8 or 12 ounces of water you shake it up and you drink it the taste is very very drinkable i 16:04 actually enjoy it and i have been using it and my energy levels have just been through the roof i 16:11 really like athletic greens because of some of the sustainability things that they do so they buy carbon 16:18 credits and you know to help protect the rain forest which is something that i really like 16:24 but if you order athletic greens in your subscription you're going to also get a 16:30 year's supply of their vitamin d supplementation and five free travel 16:35 packs and that vitamin d is so important during those winter months when we're 16:41 not getting enough sunlight we've talked about how that decreases your mood and 16:46 increases depression and that can be a real deal changer so you go to 16:51 athleticgreens.com emerging that's athleticgreens.com 16:58 e-m-e-r-g-i-n-g that's the psych with mike promo and 17:03 you're going to get that additional vitamin d support for a year and five 17:08 free travel packs so take control of your own health today and as always if 17:14 it's friday it's psych with mike okay we're back and so i really like 17:21 that language that you're using and what i'm wanting to to know the the 17:28 to try and crystallize this for me is how do you initially 17:35 approach that shame that the client 17:40 feels how do you do that in a way that doesn't get them to turtle up and 17:45 and want to defend themselves so one of the things that 17:50 occurs and do you understand what i'm saying yeah okay i think yeah one thing that 17:56 occurs is i get angry that some adult has abused a child i am angry 18:02 a child that survived that kind of abuse is hypersensitive to my anger 18:08 so i want to identify it and say i am angry but i'm not angry with you i'm not 18:13 angry at whatever you had to do to survive i have no antagonism towards that at all wow okay okay this is what 18:20 this is exactly where i wanted to go yeah yeah because i and i didn't know that it was but yeah this is exactly right so you're counter transference 18:28 is to be angry shutting off their their radar though but their transference then 18:34 is to experience that anger as similar to similarly traumatizing 18:40 to their original experience it interferes with the connection yeah and the and the uh 18:47 strengthening of that individual mm-hmm so what they have to experience from me and i don't know if you pay close enough 18:54 attention but my when when i drop into therapy mode that way my voice changes my delivery changes it's more soothing 19:01 yeah i've never noticed that uh then when i'm just casually in conversation uh that's because you've never been in 19:06 therapy with me yes i've noticed that a million different i could i could identify a million different times when 19:12 i knew brett just dropped into the he's doing it oh he's doing it yeah and i'm sure if i called your wife she would be 19:17 able to correct it robin williams and matt damon spent an entire movie getting to this point that 19:24 we're getting to here where it's not your fault it's a very powerful message 19:29 absolutely it's it's an incredibly powerful message and necessary but okay so so let me let me go back to this and 19:35 so so the the the counter transference is you would be angry and just counter 19:40 transference is the therapist projected onto you and then the the transference is the client's experience of the 19:46 therapist and therapy and and so uh well the client is constantly going to try to 19:51 manipulate me into the traditional response that they have received yeah which is you have to 19:57 they're going to say today they say are you going to give me homework i said well do you need 20:02 homework do you want homework yeah i think so well all right here's some homework the next week thinking oh 20:07 you're going to be really mad yeah i didn't do my homework well why am i going to measure i didn't do my homework okay so what 20:13 no i didn't want i wasn't going to give you homework to begin with yeah what grade yeah exactly but but i really want to go back failure you loser so so the 20:21 transference is the counter transference is that you get angry because the child's been abused the transference is 20:26 this is re-traumatizing the same way so you're saying okay so i say to them 20:32 uh i'm not angry at you i'm angry that the situation occurred 20:38 do you ever try and not be angry i don't try to not be angry if i'm angry 20:45 i'm angry what i try to do is is clarified right you are picking up accurately what you're getting 20:52 but let me clarify it's not you that i'm angry with but this is the point that i think is so 20:58 important for therapists generally and for new therapists the goal isn't for you to not have 21:04 emotions right you're not the blank mirror that beginners are told they need to be 21:10 exactly uh you are a real person with real feelings and the client picks up on all that so you have to be able to say 21:16 i'm sad and cry when you hear something sad or laugh when something's funny to you 21:21 and then say i didn't mean to offend you it just struck me as funny uh 21:26 how do we work past right but you have to be aware enough of your own internal processes i had a couple come see me one 21:33 time a black man a white woman came from marital counseling first session i'm talking to him about coming for marriage 21:39 counseling and i said i really was that clarence thomas 21:44 want to communicate to you that i think i can hear you and i want 21:50 to hear if you have any concerns about my ability to hear you and the 21:56 black man looked at his wife they looked at me and he said one of the troubles that we are having 22:02 has to do with sex and i fantasize all the time about having sex with white women 22:10 are you too white to hear that which i thought was a brilliant question 22:17 and one he needed to have answered if i was going to be able to help him if i was going to be able to sit in a room with him if i'm sitting there judging 22:22 him and and condemning him for his fantasies right i can't help him right 22:28 and i know that and he knows that so he was able to ask can you listen but i think here and and i'm glad that that 22:34 the client was able to do that but i think the point that you made about therapists in in their training are 22:42 conditioned to believe they're supposed to be blank slate which is that is an 22:47 unachievable goal it's impossible you have to be a human person in humane but 22:52 you have to be a human person capable of monitoring their own processes well enough to know when it's not your i'm 22:59 sitting here i'm angry because you're telling me this story of abuse but i'm not angry at you 23:06 because this happened to a child so that's the point of the conversation about modeling 23:12 and re-parenting because they experience in their most vulnerable and anxious moments 23:19 modeling of appropriate responsiveness not what they experienced in their childhood yeah and so then you can 23:25 process that and discuss what did that feel like what just happened do you are you aware of that can we can do what are 23:31 your reactions to it what's your level of awareness to it because in doing that we're 23:38 re-parenting their script and one of the things that i will point 23:44 out now because this is sailing or coming into my consciousness is i have had many clients 23:52 especially when i was younger because now i'm pretty old but when i was younger i had many clients who were much 23:58 older than me that were able to experiencing experience me 24:04 as a caring nurturing parent so you don't have to necessarily think oh 24:11 i'm 32 how am i going to do this for a 50 year old man you can do it because 24:16 it's not yours to do it's the client's experience that matters and the client 24:23 can have that experience i don't know if i fully agree with that you don't i i think i do but i'm mindful of the fact 24:29 that for years what i would tell my students in counseling program younger students especially is i don't care what 24:35 skills you learn you need some aging because if i walk into your office with 24:41 marital issues and i look at you and you're 27 and i'm 70. 24:46 i'm not going to talk to you i'm not going to take that risk because i can't imagine that you can understand my 24:51 circumstances so i don't know how that changes but there's a there is a presentation that they have 24:58 to learn how to make yeah that says to me okay there's something here that maybe i can take this risk right there's 25:04 something here that maybe i'm willing to float this out here right but initially my impressions 25:10 are you're too young to know what you're talking about have you ever had any children and been a parent 25:15 and i think that this goes back to the idea of there are different therapists for different people absolutely and so 25:22 if the 70 year old man comes in and can't put themselves in that position then that's not a good therapy experience for 25:28 them and they should find somebody else but what i have experienced is that you 25:34 can present yourself as timeless once you learn how to do if you get the 25:39 opportunity yeah yeah but but the client has to buy into it right and if the client doesn't then no then it's not 25:45 going to work but i have had men who were twice my age yeah who i know experienced me as a nurturing 25:53 parent and so that can happen as long as the therapist is good at their job and 25:59 doing things right and the client is able to open themselves up to it i think another part of your point there is also 26:06 you were speaking about getting angry with the not angry at the client i'm 26:12 angry with the client for the client or the client that's the language that i think i want 26:17 to pick on maybe a little bit because your job as a as a therapist is not to 26:23 feel the emotion for the client oh absolutely i have to take clearly say this is mine it's coming out of me and 26:30 my friend at the whole counter transfer message but it's not at you 26:36 it's at however you were wounded and the fact that any child is wounded that way 26:41 and that comes from me i take ownership of it and you don't need to feel it and 26:47 we need to have this is not one-time trial learning we will repeat this conversation a number of times before 26:52 you can internalize it and and the clarification the clarification though that i would make is that 26:59 we are not so counter transference i guess if technically if it's counter transparency could be the therapist's 27:05 own stuff but when you're doing therapy you are going to experience emotions as 27:12 a therapist that are being projected by the client so you're not feeling it 27:17 for them you're feeling it with them and they may not have the language to be 27:23 able to identify like the client may be experiencing shame over that trauma 27:29 event and you may be experiencing anger and so it's important for the therapist to help them be able to identify that 27:36 language and then once you do that then the client says you know what i i'm pretty angry about that yeah and i 27:42 didn't know that and so it's important for the therapist to be able to help the client develop 27:48 language around their own emotional regulation michael's right you have to make the distinction yeah 27:54 these are not your feelings or my reflection of your feelings these are mine and they're not really about you at all 28:01 they're about the circumstances you're describing and that's a it's hard and i think there's a consent 28:07 there too but your client has to be willing to feel that with you and maybe they don't feel that at all 28:14 nudge it repeatedly right if they keep coming back right right right they will and that's the other piece that shocks 28:21 me about what doesn't necessarily shock me about security but that i find interesting about becoming more secure 28:28 somebody very close to me is going through a therapy process right now and they have had an [\xa0__\xa0] an abusive 28:35 an emotionally abusive mother for almost all of their lives um then they're also gay and they came out with this 28:43 they came back to me one day and said i said well how did therapy go and they said i didn't realize that not 28:49 everybody's parents called them a [\xa0__\xa0] and i said that's correct 28:54 that is an emotionally abusive situation and that hurts um 29:00 and he said i got a lot out of this therapy session because suddenly i realized that that wasn't 29:07 normal and that i didn't like that i said okay very good right and so that 29:12 i i really felt that there's a marked difference in this person and how they see themselves and 29:19 how they accept themselves and their sexual identity after that conversation 29:25 right good and and and so wow you know i think that that when it works it's beautiful 29:31 it's powerful you can see it yeah you know we started this out talking about the idea of the inner child and the 29:37 relationship of that to jung's theory of the the shadow and you know 29:43 so i think that there is a part of therapy that is directed 29:50 towards helping people embrace the shadow i think that's how you truly are able to establish security as an 29:57 adult is to be able to embrace those parts of yourself that you have felt either shame or 30:03 you know tried to hide i think that that is the healthy way to be able to do that but you know when you're talking about 30:10 this is he going to embrace the idea that his 30:15 mother called him a [\xa0__\xa0] for all of his life maybe not and so he it it's about acceptance i got to find a way to 30:23 accept that so do you think that he found that or is he still looking for 30:29 that i think he has accepted that that is his reality yeah and that that was and 30:36 that's very liberating and i think he always accepted that that was what happened right he didn't deny that as as 30:43 a reality it was more the understanding that that wasn't the norm yeah that that when that 30:50 happens to other people they also get angry and it is okay to feel that anger right he is 30:56 justified in that anger and it doesn't mean so maybe that's what he's working to accept is the anger that he yeah 31:03 because he was always in denial about that yes yeah well he wouldn't he wasn't allowed to feel that feeling because on 31:09 top of on top of the hate that he gets from the idea of the sexual identity there are 31:16 other ideas of masculinity underneath that and a less than man who 31:23 is gay right if i show emotion if i express this idea well that makes me 31:29 more feminine and that leans into this idea of being this thing that my parents 31:34 dislikes or my parents is picking on so many so many shame-based messages yes 31:39 it's a shame yeah so i think that's a good point to jump 31:44 off the train um hopefully this was beneficial for people as always if you have any questions or 31:50 comments about things that we're talking about please reach out to us at psychwithmike.com we would love it if 31:55 you would go to apple podcast find psych with mike and leave us a comment and a rating but most importantly we really 32:02 really really really really love it when people go to the internet and find us on 32:08 youtube psych with mike and subscribe to the show that's super super beneficial helps people find the show as always the 32:15 music that appears in cyclic mic is written and performed by mr benjamin de clue and if it's friday it's psyched\xa0