17 Oct Attachment (Everyday)
It was a beautiful setting. Perhaps the most fabulous stage I’ve ever stood on to present. Behind me was a HUGE screen to show the conference PowerPoint slides.
But, for the first time in my professional career I wasn’t using any slides. None.
As I stood there, waiting for the people to continue filtering in, a bit surprisingly, I wasn’t nervous at all. I felt completely at home, inside myself.
Yes, I had a colleague I love and adore there with me, Dr. Clodagh Dowling who is the Director of St Pat’s Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. I asked her to join me as I find it’s so much more fun to collaborate with people. Clodagh and her colleagues have integrated the BSE skills for years with the people they serve. It’s such an honor to hear how the BSE skills help people heal and grow – and thrive!
I’ve posted pictures from the conference on Facebook:
There’s so much emphasis in body oriented treatment to reorganize defenses and establishing boundaries. All very true. All necessary.
At the same time I have seen so many who become so “boundaried”, so identified with their defenses that they can’t see to open to something new.
Bowlby, of course, speaks to this with the Internal Working Model. We see, feel, hear, sense, know as reality now … almost exactly as we were imprinted in our early relational attachments.
So, how then do we train our body, mind, heart to have different experiences?
How can we bow deeply, honoring the boundaries we needed to survive, value the defenses we need while ALSO inviting in the new.
That new experience might actually be more challenging than the old familiar patterns.
The old pattern is how we experience reality. It IS reality.
It’s hard to imagine something else being true.
We might acknowledge it could be true for someone else – whatever that hoped for, longed for, wished for “it” might be.
But deep inside us… it doesn’t feel like it could possibly be true for us – for me.
That was the background of my thinking when Paul Gilbert asked me to present at this conference.
How can we ReWire Threat in our body, mind, heart?
What is our compassionate response to threat? Is it just to avoid (sometimes necessary) or defend against?
No. We literally can TRAIN our body, mind, and heart to have new experiences.
Not just THINK about the experience abstractly or conceptually – but literally to change our felt experience.
That’s the possibility and my goal is to make manifest the operationalizing, in small granular ways, of embodying attachment.
Not just to change our scores on the Adult Attachment Interview (which is necessary) but to also shift our internal experience.
To become solid, steady and secure in the face of the inevitable suffering of life.
To have a strong enough container to BE with life instead of shutting down around it, defending against it or challenging circumstances that don’t generate a more nourishing life experience for ourselves.
Yes, it takes practice. Absolutely.
Think of how many times we’ve repeated old behavioral patterns, said the same unkind things to ourselves. How many times a day? Dozens? Hundreds sometimes, right? Thousands on really bad days.
So, yes it takes practice to change. And it’s worth it.
Of course, you can always join other seekers and professionals in the Safely Embodied Learning Community as we put new patterns of love, compassion, kindness into practice.