Expand Your Ability: Embodiment, Somatics, and Feldenkrais

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If you have never experienced the fullness of a relationship that is safe and fulfilling and cooperative, and then you recognized it as such and lean into it and shared that experience and processed that experience, if you've never had that, then yeah, you'll say, wow, you know, I don't have broken attachment. I am just a realist. That's what I hear a lot from especially avoidantly attached people. I don't have attachment problems. I'm just very real about things. Things just suck.

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And I'm very honest about it. And when you try to convince them that there's a different way of living, they think that you are trying to scam them or get them hurt. That is my guest, Adam Lane Smith. He is an expert on attachment theory. What is attachment? Attachment, whether it's secure or insecure, refers to your ability to give and receive love, your ability to feel safe and secure and to offer that to others. In today's conversation.

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we explore what does secure attachment look like? What is the secure behavior that leads to mutually fulfilling relationships that are sustainable over time? Welcome to the Expand Your Ability podcast. I'm your host, Jeffrey Schwingammer. This show explores how somatic movement and awareness can help you stop your destructive habits so you can craft yourself and your relationships into something much, much better.

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I teach somatic movement and awareness through the Feldenkrais method. Okay, before we get started, I just want to say that I'm super excited to share this episode with you. It's an absolute honor to have on Adam Lane Smith. He's been my mentor for a year. His teachings have been a guiding light for me in improving my relationships. We don't lay out the attachment theory framework in detail in this episode. I did an intro to attachment theory in episode 31.

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So please check it out if you'd like to have more context about attachment theory. All right. Without further ado, let's get started. All right. Welcome Adam. Thank you for joining the podcast. Hey, Jeffrey. Thank you for having me here. It's good to talk to you again. Yeah, this is great. I'm super excited to have you on the podcast. So as a little bit of a kind of a bigger picture framework. So in the Feldenkrais method, which is a somatic movement method that I study and I teach, we look at.

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insecurity on the individual level, on the level of your movements, your muscular movements, your choices. And when I came across your work, I thought it was such a great pairing with the individual work that I've been studying, that very curious, very inquiry-driven work, because you bring that to, I think, social relations. I think you bring that in a way of thinking about how does our insecurity...

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live in our relationships with others, how is it maintained and how can we heal that insecurity? And so it's been a real great treat to have you as a mentor and to learn from you in and your attachment framework. Absolutely. So I will start off by saying that I have immense respect for people like you in the somatic healing area, doing the work with the body. I think that doing work with the body is one of the number one things we need to do to manage our fear.

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and our nervous system and our trauma responses. When I work now in coaching with people on attachment, that's often step zero before we can even begin doing their work with attachment is to do body work first, to make sure that they even have the capacity to start asking the scary questions or having the scary conversations. Because if your nervous system is stopping you, there is very little you can do to try to reprogram your brain. Nervous system is king first, right? 100%. Once we go through the body work.

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Once we get somebody ready to be able to do the actual mental health work, what I have found over my 15 years of training and experience doing this is

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They really do live with so much of their fear in their body. They experience it physically and they, they live day to day with chronic fear and pain that are wrapped up in each other with stress, with tension throughout their whole body system. So many people don't realize how muscle aches or neck aches or back pain or joint pain, even autoimmune issues or insomnia, how often these pieces are tied directly into their attachment issues and their relational problems.

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I have, uh, I have one person I've worked with in the past that ground their teeth down to almost nothing. And then they got caps put on their teeth and then they ground those down as well through nighttime grinding, just through their stress and their relationships. I remember working with somebody who had severe traumas and when they would describe some of the, the painful experiences that they lived, they would, their, their left eye would begin twitching drat dramatically and they'd sort of flinch away.

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on repeatedly. So it's amazing how much our body stops us from from healing to try to protect us. But also once we just have to start the healing process, how much we have to take care of our body. Have you found that in the work that you've done as well with people who have severe challenges like that? Oh, 100% Yeah, absolutely. The the insecurities that we have manifest in our bodies, they have to where else would they be? Right. And so the the ways we hold ourselves tense, or maybe we hunch over, we grind our teeth.

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They happen without our awareness. They just, and we can address them by becoming aware of them and like inhibit that pattern. Because otherwise we just kind of play out these old insecurity patterns. These, you know, they try to be, help us protect ourselves or manage the stress, but they kind of play out in negative ways over time. A lot of wear and tear.

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terms of grinding teeth or actual physical posture or like back issues. Or I will say, I will say that unintentional coping patterns tend to be some of the largest drivers of long term breakdown in your body and in your mind, whether that's unintentional coping patterns by hunching over. So you're scared, right? Dr. Peterson calls it like the lobster hunch or something like that. Right. Um, or, or

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shying away from people in physical settings so that you have closed body language so no one speaks to you. So then you become more and more isolated or even mental or emotional coping mechanisms with attachment. For example, what I teach and as you know, attachment is the belief that it comes from trying to connect other people and give and receive love. And when you don't believe other people will connect with you fairly and give and receive love with you that nobody's going to love you.

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then your unintentional coping mechanisms are to try to manipulate other people, to, to emotionally tighten up, to emotionally shy away from, to emotionally send the wrong signals to protect yourself. It's, your body mimics your mind and your mind mimics your body. And it's the unintentional coping that does the most damage. Right. And I think something you said there about the mind mimicking the body and the body mimicking the mind is also a third layer, the environment mimicking you.

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Right? If you're acting in a particular shy way and you're kind of withdrawing from the world, the environment's going to respond to that and then give you more of that input potentially. That's so true. And I'm not, I will say this very carefully. I'm not one of those people that talks about manifesting with your energy or anything like that. So don't take this next statement wrong. But we do tend to attract what we expect because we use bait to attract the familiar. Right? We, we

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We send out signals to people who will respond to our problems in the way that we expect them to be responded to. And then we'll be surprised when everybody that we meet is the same kind of mean, awful person as our father was when we grew up, for example, or as manipulative as our mother was, because we're used to that, and that's what we're used to, and what we will seek out, because it's all we know how to respond to. And we will find... What's that old saying?

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You are a man is most likely to meet his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it. That that's, that's what you are going to find. You're most likely to find your suffering on the road that you take to avoid your suffering. Um, you need to be intentional about the roads that you're taking. And I think that can be a real challenge, right? Because we learn how to be in the world based on our experience, right? Based on our parents or caregivers, the schools we've been in, the media, we experience.

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Our experience informs us and shapes us in some way. And so that also shapes our imagination or just what we're familiar with. Right. If we have an expectation that, um, people won't return to me love, well, then maybe I shouldn't trust people. Right. It just makes it kind of logical. The inability to trust others. You know, it's even worse is if you believe people won't return love than the people who come along, who try to give you love.

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will seem like the most troublesome, dangerous, dishonest people in the planet, and you won't trust them. You'll push them away. But you know who you will pull in is the awful people who treat you like dirt, because you're going to say, well, at least they're honest. Right. And that's the absolute trip. There's this kind of separation or self-selecting out insecure people from secure people, right? Insecure behaviors actually kind of

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maintain or propagate themselves through more insecure relations. I think that's what you're saying there. You actually attract more insecurity. And I think if you don't even know how you are insecure, because it's so familiar, it's like the water the fish swims in, this fish doesn't know the water from anything else, it's just this is how I swim. Like they don't even, might not even characterize their behavior as insecure. And then they don't even know how that's repelling.

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better possible options, better possible relationships. Correct. Well, it's just like if your body's all hunched over and you're breathing super rapid and that's been your whole life is shallow breathing and you're hunched over and you're tight and you're stiff, then you might have an experience of pain, but you're probably going to say, wow, everyone on the planet hurts when they hunch over and gasp for breath. Oh, well, I guess just as that's how humans are. And you'll just go along with the pain.

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Cause you don't know how to straighten up. You don't have to keep yourself straightened up. You don't know how to breathe differently. It's the same with relationships and attachment. If you have never experienced the fullness of a relationship that is safe and fulfilling and cooperative, and then you recognized it as such and lean into it and shared that experience and process that experience, if you've never had that, then yeah, you'll say, wow.

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I don't have broken attachment. I am just a realist. That's what I hear a lot from, especially avoidantly attached people. I don't have attachment problems. I'm just very real about things. Things just suck and I'm very honest about it. And when you try to convince them that there's a different way of living, they think that you are trying to scam them or get them hurt. Yeah, that's actually a real interesting point there. I'm being a realist. Because I've certainly had thoughts like that. I'm being real about this. That's...

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Like, like, like I'm trying to see the world as it is, but I'm maybe affirming my own sort of perception of the world. You know? Mm hmm. Keep in mind that our perception does not make things real. You could have someone that believes that vampires rule the world. And if you say, you know, buddy, you've got an awful lot of garlic and wooden stakes around your house.

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and an awful lot of fake blood supply to throw at people, to escape or whatever. You're always checking people in mirrors. You're a little paranoid. They would say, I'm not paranoid. I'm a realist, because the vampires are coming to get me. And I say this, knowing I've worked with a number of people who actually do believe things like this. That's part of mental health. But they don't recognize the insanity of what they're doing. They don't recognize the brokenness of what they're doing.

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They don't recognize that their point of view is skewed, because to them, it's 100% logical. It is no different from the young woman who says, well, I have to sleep with people on the first date, or they won't be interested in me, and they'll just abandon me and find someone who will sleep with them on the first date. And it's not that she likes doing it. She truly believes it is mandatory, or people will abandon her, and that she will be more miserable if she doesn't.

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It's no different from that. The beliefs that we hold, hold us captive. So we need to be questioning our beliefs continuously to see if they align with objective reality.

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My sense is, from my experience, a good way to question the beliefs is to get a clear presentation of what it could look like. And I think that's what I actually received. Possibilities. What I've received through learning from you is like, I think you're particularly great at describing what secure behavior looks like. One of my favorite things is when you suggest, well, you could just say it this way, right? Because my...

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My insecure mind will come up with all these complex ways and I'll play four dimensional chess in my mental conversation I'll have with this person. And then you'll just put in this simple sentence that just takes the conversation one step forward easily without ruining anything and it gives you more information and actually just simplifies the whole thing. And I think that's one of the great things about you is how you present a simple picture.

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of simple in the sense of, of, of clear and like, it's easy to step into. I want to step into that sort of secure space. And I was curious if we could talk about what does a secure person look like? What does secure behavior look like or healthy relationships for that matter? Yeah, that's a great question. That's a very great question. Cause most people have never seen that model before.

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Most people don't have a framework for healthy or secure. I'll be honest, I draw most of my inspiration from being a father. I have four kids, I got baby, baby number five is on the way right now. And...

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My work with young people, my work with through the years, interestingly, I've done an extensive amount of work with people in the autistic community. People with autistic brains are fantastic. I love working with them because they are so direct and so blunt and they do ask those questions. The rest of us are afraid of asking. But the reason they get slapped down is the reason that many children get slapped down. You know, we all start off asking blunt questions. We learn not to.

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We learned that those get punished. People with, with autistic tendencies and features, they get punished for asking what other people consider obvious questions. They get slapped down. They get made fun of. They get alienated. They get ostracized. Um, that's, that is how you foster bad attachment in someone. And unfortunately that's what, that's what a lot of

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damaged parents due to their children's nowadays and that's why many of us develop attachment issues is as Children we are slapped down for asking obvious questions. We're told stop asking those questions that hurts people's feelings Don't talk about that. Don't think like that. Don't say that. I don't have time for you. Your questions are annoying You are annoying even if they don't say it in so many words you get punished for asking basic questions Which is why Jeffrey people come along and say Adam

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What should I do? How should I phrase this? What should I ask? And you've spent three hours planning it, and I come along with a machete and chop through the red tape and tell you to ask the way a five-year-old would ask. It's what I basically do. That's a lot of my test, is how would a five-year-old phrase this? Well, a five-year-old would just ask, probably while picking their nose. So just don't pick your nose and ask the question in a way that a five-year-old would ask. That's a general rule. What does secure attachment look like?

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Here's an interesting quote that you'll probably like. I picked this up from somebody that I talked to recently. They said, you know, you can't really say the wrong thing to the right person, because the right person, even if you say the wrong thing, they're going to work with you. They're going to tell you, hey, that's not the right thing, and they'll give you a chance to say, oh, you know what, you're right, that's not what I meant. Or they'll say, hey, that really hurt my feelings, let's make that better.

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Let's work together and make it better. They don't punish you and make you go on an apology tour or give them one of your kidneys to make it right. They stop and say, hey, something wasn't quite right there. Let's cooperate and make it work. Let's fix it together. So if you're a man and maybe you're dating a woman and you're interested in moving toward commitment, right? You don't have to play a game.

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and pretend figure out, okay, where's she at on the scale? How does she feel about me? Am I, am I Andrew Tate enough? Do I have enough Bugattis? Then have I flexed enough in front of her? And have I threatened her per with the presence of other scantily clad women in my life yet? Have I told her I could sleep around if I want to? Have I made her scared and insecure enough? You know, you don't have to do that. You can just say, hey, I'm really interested in you. I'm really enjoying our time together.

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I would love to have more time together with you. How are you feeling about this thing on your side? What would you like to see? I'd love to take another step and become exclusive. What would have to happen for you to feel comfortable doing that? It is being that clear and direct the way a five year old who finds someone on the playground says, you like Ninja turtles. I like Ninja turtles too. Let's talk about Ninja turtles. And then they say.

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I had so much fun talking about Ninja Turtles. Can we be friends? Can you come to my house and we'll talk about Ninja Turtles more? That's how little kids talk when they're not taught that that's bad. That's how we talk when we're naturally formed and we grow up with decent attachment or people take us seriously and treat us fairly. That's how we talk. That's how we should always talk. So what does it look like to have secure attachment? It's that. It's being able to be very clear about what you need, what you think, and even be wrong.

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and the other person will work with you and say, hey, let's figure this out. And then they will. They take you seriously, they treat you fairly. No stress on either side. No stress. Right, because the insecure perspective of the world is I have a limited amount of resources or I need to protect myself in some way. And likely if I do this poorly, the other person's going to reject me or not participate with me.

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And like if you come in with that thinking, you'll probably try to get everything just right in the right order and do it perfectly. But if, I mean, ideally other people are cooperative, right? Like they will work with you. A securely attached romantic relationship between, for example, a husband and a wife. I get this question all the time. What does it look like? What should sex look like? How should the husband ask for sex? Or does he have to? Or...

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Or should she drop everything and just do it? Can she have needs? The best example of a securely attached marriage is the husband saying, hey, you know what? It's been a couple of days. I could use some love. I'm walking funny and I need some attention over here. How can we make this work? I'd love to have an evening with you. And the wife says, I would like that too, but we haven't spent much time talking in the last week and I feel really lonely and disconnected from you.

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Could we go on a date first? Could we sit and talk for 20 minutes? Could we talk about our day? Could we just reconnect? Let's go on a walk. Let's spend time together, and then I will feel closer to you, and then I will enjoy it, and we'll have the time of our lives tonight. That would be a securely attached relationship where he asks openly, and she also asks openly, and they take care of each other's needs. It's not transactional, it's mutually fulfilling. That would be a secure relationship right there. Yeah, and I have your book here, Slaying Your Fear.

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And that's the negotiating of needs or exchanging of needs where I have this need, you know, you put out your hand as you describe in the book. I have this need. Would you help me reach this need? What do you need in return? And you put out the other hand. Exactly. Right. Exactly. If you ask your wife for sex, she is probably not going to ask for $300. It's probably going to be holding her hand and taking a walk. Good pro tip.

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Yeah. So mutual fulfillment is a strong piece here. Do you know why mutual fulfillment is important in secure relationships? I mean, you know what it is. Do you know why it is? Why is mutual fulfillment important in relationships?

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Well, in that way, I imagine both people are fulfilling each other. They're making each other, uh, I guess the image that's coming to mind that like you're filling your tank again. Uh, you're replenishing your battery, whatever the metaphor is, you're, you are better for being in the relationship. You're, you're recovered in some way. You're restored in some way. You're not depleted. Yes. Now that's why each person wants to be mutually fulfilled.

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The reason that we want the relationship to be mutually fulfilling for the other person over the other person. Here's why. Gotcha. Yeah. See, see, here's why securely attached people want to fulfill you. They don't want to rob you and exploit you of everything they can get. It's because they value relationships that are stable and sustainable. A sustainable relationship is one where the other person is fed and the other person is cared for.

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and the other person feels good in the relationship. So you keep coming and coming and coming. I read a fantastic book called What Rich Clients Want. I read it years back. And it talks about if you want to serve people who are wealthy individuals, who are top one percenters, who run businesses and make things happen, if you want to work with them.

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understand that you need to give value. You don't need to be selfish and transactional and hoard everything and and bleed them from every nickel that you can give them value, treat them kindly with with real human kindness and generosity, and they in turn will treat you the same. Here's why, because they value people who are genuine, and who are kind and who are generous and they will want to keep you around. So what do they do?

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One of their best assets that they have is to give you gifts, is to give you kindness, to give you money, bonuses. They'll give you an expensive watch. It's not just, hey, here's some cash, go buy yourself something nice. It's you, it's them saying, you have given me tremendous value and I never want you to leave. So I am going to go over and above what you have asked for and give to you one of the best assets I have in plentifulness. I will give to you what you need.

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so that you are fulfilled and you will follow me where I go and keep helping me to accomplish things. People get this wrong. They think that wealthy people and high performers are these stingy people and they're not. The best of them are incredibly generous and they take care of the people who help them because they know that those people help them. The same thing is true in every secure relationship. The people who are secure and stable and loving.

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know that you are helping make their life wonderful and they want you to be fulfilled. So you follow them. It is self-serving, but it's not selfish because they also give out of love and care to you. Same thing on play. So they will want mutual fulfillment. They won't want to overtake from you. They won't want you to over give to them. They are bothered if you martyr yourself for them. If you deplete yourself for them, like an anxiously attached person would.

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They get bothered by that because they know it's not sustainable. So if you want a secure relationship, you need to be capable of giving love, but also of receiving love. Otherwise you will not find yourself with a secure person.

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And I can sense even just listening to that from my own experience that it seems so foreign, the way you describe, you know, that people are particularly successful in that way. It's just like, wow, that like they must have had a different life experience, of course. And to be so generous and so like, like it's what like, it's so fascinating to hear that description. It's like, I want to step more into that. I want to I want to clearly embody that. That sounds great, like, because it's to care about other people.

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is in your best interest, right? And to really live that out. I had, I have a very good friend who owns a company and they have an exceptional, exceptional employee who carries a tremendous amount of weight in their company. I remember going out to lunch with my friend and he was raving about the incredible work this, this, this,

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person had done in his company and how this person had helped drive so much improvement, not only for him and the company, but also for the clients that they served. And so I asked him, well, what are you going to do to keep that person around? And he said, I am already ahead of you. He said, I have, I've raised a salary. I've got a salary on the horizon for another six months, another improvement. And I'm also throwing them a bonus at the end of the sales cycle based on how we have grown.

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I am making sure they feel invested in the growth of the company and I'm staying well ahead of any competitors that could pay them more than we could pay them, but I'm making sure they know that we value them because I can, I will not leave. He said, I will not lose this person. Not even cannot, but will not. He was determined stack that up against, you know, so much of the American corporate mindset, but most of us see the lower levels of the American corporate mindset of you have no skills.

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We can replace you with a flyer that talks about your department kind of thing. And most of us are used to starting out at entry level jobs. Um, it's not right to treat people poorly in those positions. It's not. And also a lot of people get treated poorly in those positions, but that's not how secure relationships should work. So you should also make sure you have a secure relationship with your company. Some companies are known for treating their employees very, very well. Um,

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There's a company up in the far upper north that you might know called Anderson Windows, which is renowned throughout the entire world for windows and doors and fixtures. And they are known for treating their company and their employees exceptionally well versus what a lot of other companies do, which is just grab you up, use you up, toss you out the window. So there are companies, there are relationships, there are friendships, there are families. Some are secure, some are not. Make sure that you're connecting with people that value you.

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Right. So in that example, that company, that person is operating towards mutual fulfillment or interest in the fulfillment of their employee. Yeah. Yeah. Fulfilling the employee actually fulfills his needs as a company, as an employee, as a company owner, their client's needs, their money goes up, his quality of life goes up by feeding and caring for that individual. Now I happen to know this business owner. He's a good friend of mine.

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I know he's not just, yeah, hey, how much can I get out of this guy? He actually does care about providing for the, for the man and for the man's family. Um, both are in his head, both care for a human being and also make sure that this person feels valued and the relationship is sustainable and they stay. Make sure that they stay as they are sustained. It's both. Yeah. There's a, another idea that comes to mind. This, um,

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people over outcomes, which I think is related to this. That you, if I were to try and describe it here, it's prioritizing the relationship over any specific situational outcome. And so you write about this in Selling Your Fear, where let's say the date plan didn't work out.

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And so, okay, that's fine. That outcome didn't work out today. What is something we can do now instead? How can we focus on us? And I can see that as such a great emphasis because I think the business owner that tries to get the most money, to get the most out of their employees, they're looking for the outcomes. They're looking for, I want to extract as much as I can.

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Okay, well if we put the outcome aside, I mean, I guess we don't want to ignore all outcomes, but like, what is, what works for the people here? How can we focus on our fulfillment right now? Right, I mean that's focusing on outcomes. Let's take some stupid examples. Would be the, the business owner who has an incredible employee, but something happens on a project.

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And after five years of doing phenomenal work, the employee does something, it fails to meet an important deadline. And the business owner disregards five years of diligent, faithful effort, and rips into the employee and unloads on them and tanks their morale and threatens them going forward because they didn't get the outcome they wanted.

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or they're facing a deadline, so they buckle down viciously and force the employee to meet that deadline without regard for how it's going to impact the employee. They aren't caring about the long-term sustainability of the relationship. They want this outcome now. It's the husband who is angry his wife won't have sex with him tonight, and they've had a pretty decent relationship, but it's sex now, sex now, and that's every night, or every three nights, or whatever.

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every time he wants to have sex if they don't do it he throws a fit because it's the outcome he cares about it it's the immediate payoff he cares about not okay hey you know what there's been a number of times that you haven't been in the mood is there something going on are you not feeling well i have we change something do you need more more connection time are you are you sick is it you know what's going on let's talk about it let's build it together okay we are going to do it tonight but how can we make tonight a great night for our relationship it's um... i mean shoot it's it's it's the parent

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I work with a lot of parents who are in their 50s and 60s now, and their kids will barely speak to them. And I ask how they raised their kid, and their view growing up was, I'm going to make this kid tough, whether they like me or not. And the best thing that they could possibly do is become a surgeon or a lawyer. You get two options. And if you don't become one of those, then I have failed as a parent, but I'm not going to fail as a parent. So I'm going to do everything I have to to force you and grind you into one of those things.

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You are all we are only a successful family. If you become a successful neurosurgeon, then everything else is broken and terrible. And we have failed as a family. And that ruins the kid. It ruins the relationship. It's outcomes, outcomes instead of relationships. There's times where you need certain outcomes, certainly, or where certain outcomes are preferred. It's not that you don't care about outcomes. You're just a bum. It's it's destroying relationships

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That's that's that's that's the opposite of what you need to do for a relationship Have you ever had somebody grind you into the dirt for an outcome instead of caring about the relationship? Yeah, I've had experiences like that. Yeah And they didn't they didn't turn out really well And at the time I didn't know do you perspective to understand what was going on exactly? Yeah No, was that relationship sustainable? No

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had to end that relationship. I'm thinking in particular about a person that I had worked for. And it was really difficult to negotiate my needs as an employee with their needs as an employer. Because I felt like I had to like, I felt like I was only looking, I was the only person looking out for myself in a way that I had to fight for everything. In terms of like

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my side of it. It didn't feel like he was on my side ever. And I know as it's, it's particularly with independent contracting, that was a sort of difficult situation in itself, but yeah. What would you do different? Just really briefly, what would you do different as an employer knowing what they did? Really brief. What would you do different now? I think I would have asked a lot more questions.

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in terms of how, if I were the employer, how the employee would do things, what time availability do they have? How would they approach this particular project? Kind of, yeah, bringing in the employee's perspective and then, okay, could we do it like this or could we do it in this timeframe? Or what do we need to do to get this deliverable done?

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Yeah. That's something I call, that's the one, two punch I call clarify and collaborate, clarify and then collaborate on solving the problem together. So you would clarify first. They didn't bother clarifying. So they couldn't collaborate. You can't really collaborate until you clarify because you don't understand where the other person's coming from. So clarify and clarify. Okay. That's, that's good. What would you do if you were an employer and you had an employee who was constantly unsustainably

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sacrificing themselves for your approval in the company? Would you want that? And how would you handle that? If they were sacrificing themselves for my approval, so they were, let's say, yeah, kind of putting in long hours or doing more work than is necessary. Sure. unsustainably unsustainably. Well, I suppose. Yeah, it's not real clear what I would do. I guess I would

35:52
tried to be more specific about, hey, you know, please do these things. And any more than that is enough. Uh, or that's enough. You don't need to do any more than that. Um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's not clear. Uh, I guess I would just say, Hey, I see you're putting in a lot of work here, but I, you know, I think we're doing good at the moment. You know, we don't like, yeah, that's as far as I can get.

36:21
I haven't been in that spot. That's OK. Most people haven't been in that circumstance. That's OK. Because this is you trying to check an anxiously attached person. And what you're sensing there is the confusion that securely attached people get when they're around an anxiously attached person. They also say, I don't know what to do about this person. They're sacrificing. I don't know what to do. Why are they doing this? This is weird. How do I stop them? That's the same confusion a securely attached person gets. That's what you just experienced.

36:49
That's the same weird, confused, fluttery feeling that they get. And that's why they back away from anxiously attached people is, is that, that weirdness right there. So here's what you do. If you're confronted by someone who is unsustainably martyring themselves for, for your attention in a relationship or in a business is you sit them down and say, Hey, I want us to have a sustainable relationship where we can go forward for years and work together. And this is just not sustainable. I appreciate that you're doing this.

37:18
but it's not what I want from you because it's going to break things and you're not going to be able to keep it up and it's going to shorten our relationship. It just will. So in the interest of us actually staying together, which is ultimately what you will the anxiously attached person want. You don't want me to abandon you. That's why you're doing this. Here are the clear guidelines of what I want and here are the clear guidelines of what I extra I would tolerate from you. If you have to do some extra, okay.

37:46
But here's the limit of what extra I'm willing to tolerate. Other than that, past that, it's not sustainable. I know you're gonna burn out, and then it's gonna get ugly for both of us, so I won't be able to trust you. So here's my expectations. What do you think of this? Is this tolerable? Can you do this? If you're scared about it, can you come talk to me instead of just trying to appease me? Instead of unsustainably burning yourself out, can you come talk to me, and we can handle your fears that way, because that's sustainable. That's manageable. That is how you reach

38:16
mastered handling somebody with anxious attachment style. Most people with secure attachment have never been there, so they don't know how to do that. Right. Yeah, even if you have a secure attachment style, that you, there's still skills to learn. There's all sorts of dynamics that can play out in like, what do I do in this situation? You know? Yeah, it's so interesting to talk a person back from giving.

38:44
For in order to have sustainability over the long term. It's an interesting idea that like yeah We have to pace ourselves and and to figure out what that pacing is is through a conversation Where you do look at this long term it has to be yeah Because it's not one person deciding for the other person or compulsively deciding or just habitually doing what they do You have to have the conversation around expectations

39:12
And that's that is why securely attached people value sustainable relationships. That's why they don't want you to over give is because they want mutual fulfillment because the only then can they actually trust you and rely on you. They don't have to say, all right, when's this guy going to burn out? How bad is the burnout going to be? How bad is the flame out going to be in our company? Are they going to do this? Are they going to blow up in front of a client? Are they going to cost me money? Are they going to give me a bad reputation?

39:40
Are they going to have a heart attack and now I have his death on my conscience? What am I going to have to do to deal with the fallout when this guy finally snaps? Cause he's burned himself out. This is why securely attached people don't want to be around anxiously attached people. It's also to some extent why avoidantly attached people don't want to be around sick, anxiously attached people, which is ultimately why anxiously attached people get abandoned all the time is because they are creating unsustainable relationships that scare other people. Right.

40:11
Yeah, it seems like the key word here is sustainable, right? It's not about the intensity or the excitement of the relationship. A secure relationship is something that's sustainable, that is, that is safe, uh, characterized by trust that we're in this together. And if one person is overgiving or under giving or like, like it's not sustainable over a long period of time. Correct.

40:40
It's sustainable. Sustainable is secure and secure is sustainable. It's, it's, it's the same word. It's looped back and forth. Insecure attachment is not sustainable. It creates unsustainable relationships. Secure attachment creates sustainable relationships. And that's why it kills me when people say, oh, marriage, marriage could never last anymore. We, we live too long for marriages to last. Right. It's, it's, it's the, it's a longevity thing.

41:09
You can't possibly stay married for 50 or 60 years. It's just not possible anymore. Marriage is meant to be traded off. Um, no, it's sustainable relationships. When you build a sustainable relationship that fulfills your needs as you go, or you talk with each other as you go, you clarify continuously and collaborate continuously. And the relationship isn't stagnant. You don't ignore it. You, you grow in it together.

41:37
And when neither one of you is martyring yourself for the other, but you also haven't exploited each other back and forth, you're continuously mutually fulfilling yourself. How could it possibly not be sustainable? Right. What's coming to mind is another word in here, predictable or consistent, right? That like that secure people show up consistently for other people.

42:04
And I think that was kind of like such an interesting thing because I'm an open-minded guy in terms of like, I'm creative, I'm artistic, I like ideas, I like novelty, I like doing new things. And I need to be sure to temper that with being consistent, being reliable. I'll just step in here and say, yes, you're pretty awesome, I like you.

42:29
For everyone listening out there, I can confirm I've had breakfast with this guy. He is amazing. Just real quick. But yes, that's it. You are. You are consistent. You are predictable. You always show up. You lead classes. You do trainings and you help other people consistently heal and change and grow and understand. Now, imagine if you showed up drunk and angry to one of those classes all of a sudden and you're teaching everybody, here's how to feel better.

42:58
and healing your body and then one day you come in, all right, effers, I'm tired of all of you, I'm hungover from last night, all right, get over, quit whining, quit crying, right? You violated their predictability and their trust in an enormous way, then you better have a darn good reason for doing it. Predictability, it makes you safe. Right. And those are the ways we can be safe for other people, by being predictable, right?

43:27
Because I think a lot of our anxiousness or insecurity stems around what are other people going to do? Can I trust that they will do what they say? You know, can I somewhat predict what they'll do based on their past behavior? Okay, in this situation, I know they will act in my best interest once again.

43:49
That's right. It's it's the anticipation of pain of being sucked dry and discarded or the anticipation of not being treated fairly or the anticipation of being forced shackled into an unsustainable hamster wheel where you have to run even if your legs are broken. Right. It's anxious attached and avoidant attached. People both are terrified.

44:17
of unsustainable relationships, either because they will get used and abused, or because they'll get abandoned and discarded. They're they're they're both afraid of unsustainable relationships. So when they're predictable, when they're secure, when they're sustainable, everybody can calm down and everybody can relax, except for disorganized people that makes them a little more scared than usual. Yeah, I had an insight some time ago around like

44:45
It's probably based on something you'd said, but like the relationships are supposed to be a little bit boring Yeah, just a touch so that you go out and do fun things do you do fun things together, right? But like like like boring is actually a feature. It's not a it's not something to get rid of It's like it's predictable like and I think as an having insecurity you see boring as a problem or an agitation source That you want to get away from anything that feels boring

45:16
And I think there's actually, there's gotta be a different word than boring. It's probably, you know, what we've been talking about in terms of feeling safe, right? Feeling secure, soothed. Yeah, right. Like it's nothing's happening. And so yeah, it's you do so much body work. And I love I love that you do this. It's fantastic. So let me ask you this, Mr. Body expert, your central nervous system, is it meant to be amped up all the time and super stimulated constantly?

45:45
Or is your central nervous system designed to feel comfort in, in low levels of contentment and regulation? Is it better up here, super happy or steadily down here? Where is your nervous system meant to be? It's definitely meant to be in the second one and, and to be able to smoothly go back and forth and not to get stuck too high or not to get stuck too low either, but to be able to kind of have this ebb and flow. Yeah. I mean, you look at a squirrel.

46:16
their nervous system is not meant to be, you know, doing lines of cocaine all every day, you know, every, every hour a squirrel takes a line of cocaine. I mean, squirrel, they have moments of high energy, but I would argue that's not even super high for their nervous system necessarily. They're simply performing actions. It's they aren't meant to be running terrified from predators 24 hours a day.

46:39
And they also aren't meant to be constantly on an overabundance of, of stimulation, stimulation, stimulation, stimulation, even good stimulation. They're meant to be soothed and calmed. If you have a dog or a cat, how much of the day does your dog or cat spend in stimulation versus how much do they spend resting and content and relax? Is your dog depressed because he naps half of the day or is he pretty happy sitting there in a sunbeam and he's pretty warm and relaxed?

47:08
That's the thing is when your nervous system stops doing this up and down and up and down when it's when it's just in the middle, small ups and small downs, then you know what? The small ups actually feel like big ups. They actually feel really good. You really enjoy a sunbeam. You really enjoy a new pair of socks. You really enjoy a good hamburger. You really enjoy going out to lunch with a friend. You don't need

47:34
You don't need to win the lottery and have sex with a hot stranger and get a high five from the President of the United States. You don't have to have all three of those things happening at the same time just to feel good to try to compensate for the downs that you feel. You feel really good eating a good hamburger with a good friend. The highs, they can be low. They can be lower highs, but they feel better. That's what your nervous system is built for. It's built to be in the middle.

48:02
Right. And in that story, I hear a lot of just possible appreciation for life in that ebb and flow, right? I got a good hamburger. Great. Right. I'm having a great time with my friend. Great. It doesn't need to be, uh, an Odyssey to get some grand outcome. No, this is good. Right here. You know, I, I, my head insecure attachment years and years and years back and I fixed it.

48:31
And that's what started me on this journey of fixing attachment for the people. But I remember at the time, my favorite part of the holiday season was like all, all the stimulation and seeing people and gifts and, and fun and giving gifts and trying to get, you know, cultivate favor with people by giving them the perfect gift and all the attachment stuff up and down and up and down. And you know what my favorite part of the holiday season now is to two things.

49:00
One is watching my kids be happy with presents, watching them happy with a little toy or something. And number two is every single year, my mother-in-law, she buys me a brand new pair of wool socks every year. I always know I'm getting a nice pair of wool socks. And she goes all out. She buys me a nice pair of wool socks. And one of my favorite feelings in the world, and I'm gonna sound so boring, but one of my favorite feelings in the world is putting on a brand new pair of fresh wool socks in the wintertime.

49:30
And feeling them, they constrict your feet just right. They feel so cozy. And you are the snuggliest, coziest you have ever felt in your entire life with a brand new pair of wool socks. I feel like I should be running a commercial for wool socks right now. But that, when you have fixed your nervous system, that, putting on a fresh pair of wool socks and watching your kids play with their new toys, that for me is parasailing with movie stars. It's that level of enjoyment.

50:00
and joy and comfort. It's the same level that somebody else would have to snort a line of cocaine and sleep with a pile of supermodels, right? It's the same level of enjoyment for me to just enjoy my pair of socks and enjoy my children. You don't need that level of extreme when you are sustainable and fulfilled and content. Your life is so much more joyful. Hey man, that's beautiful.

50:28
Perhaps that's where we can leave it there for the time being. That was a wonderful image to leave us with. Where do you go from wool socks, Merrily? I mean, that's the pinnacle. That's the end. I think you've nailed it right there. No, I love that. So thank you. Well, I guess for our audience, how can they follow you or learn more about you?

50:51
Sure. Yeah. Thank you. So I am Adam Lane Smith. You can't go by Adam Smith if you want to write books, because there'll be 3000 pages of books on Amazon before they get to yours. So I'm Adam Lane Smith. I have a website, adamlanesmith.com, where I have my coaching, I have my private community, the attachment circle. I have my course, the attachment bootcamp, which walks you through fixing all of these relationship issues so that you can build sustainable.

51:20
relaxing and enjoyable relationships so that you can reach that moment where you don't need the ups or downs because your life is fulfilled and content. If you want that, check me out. I'm also on Instagram at attachment Adam, and I'm on YouTube at attachment Adam. Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. You're a huge inspiration for me and this has been an honor. So thank you. Thank you, my friend. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.

51:47
Make sure to check out the show notes to find a link to Adam's website and his YouTube. He generously shares loads of resources about improving your relationships through healing your attachment. In the show notes you'll also find some of my resources, including how to sign up for my newsletter, where you can get direct experience about how movement and awareness can change your life. If you appreciate the show, please show it by sharing this episode with someone you care about, leaving a review,

52:17
or just simply sending me an email, let me know what you think. Because having conversations is so helpful for deepening our learning, I invite you to talk with a friend or family member about the ideas you heard in this episode. And here's the question I'd like to leave with you today. What new awarenesses around your insecure patterns in relationships did you discover? And what's one idea of what you could do about it?

52:47
Thank you for your attention.