Ep #58: Cultivating Secure Attachment with Sarah Conway

Hi, this is Angela, one of Amy’s podcast producers. Amy asked our team to pick an episode to re-air this week that we thought would be beneficial for you all to hear again. With how busy and stressful the holidays can be for us and our kiddos, emotional regulation is so important. So we decided to re-air Amy’s conversation with Sarah Conway about emotional regulation. Without further ado, here’s the episode.

Sarah: Okay. So I am a child psychologist and a parent coach and I specialize in supporting parents and children with emotional regulation. And I have been a child psychologist for about 15 years now. Much of my work has been supporting young people as a health therapist. And I actually discovered after a little while of doing this work that a lot of the work I was doing was actually with parents rather than done with young people. And so things kind of shifted for me a few years ago.

I realized that I wanted to work a little bit more with parents, helping them with some of their own unhealed wounds and traumas and things from their own childhood so that they could support their children when they were going through difficult times. And so that is what I do now. I work primarily with parents providing parent coaching and supporting them to kind of break some of those more harmful generational cycles that they tend to get stuck in, yeah.

Amy: That is so cool. And I love this idea that one of the best ways we can help our kids is to kind of help heal ourselves. What a cool thing that is.

Sarah: Absolutely, yeah.

Amy: Okay. So I wanted to talk to you about secure attachment. We kind of started talking about that a little bit when we were talking before the show. And tell me what that is and why it matters and why we need to know about that.

Sarah: Okay. So as I was saying before we started, this is a big topic. I’m going to do my best to condense it as much as I can. But attachment is essentially about the connection and a bond that we have with other people, primarily with our parents and with our caregivers. And essentially we all come into the world biologically programmed to connect with other people and to form attachments to other people because this is what ensures our survival. So there are three kinds of primary attachment needs that we all have or three important aspects of attachment that we always need to look at.

So that’s proximity, so infants have this innate need to remain close, physically close to their caregivers. There’s safe haven, so children need to be able to return to a caregiver for comfort if they get distressed and to get their needs met. And then as parents we also need to be a secure base for children. So once they’re getting their needs for proximity and for safe haven met they need to be able to go out and explore the world and get that need for curiosity met. So we need to be that secure base that they can do that from. So that’s a little bit about attachment in general.

And then if we are looking at secure attachment, what we need to be able to do is to responsibly meet our children’s needs in each of those areas in order to develop a really secure attachment and a secure bond where children feel really good about themselves and really good about the world. They think it’s a safe place. And they feel good about other people so they know that they can trust other people to keep them safe and to meet their needs. So if we can do that, that is how we develop a secure attachment.

And often when I say this parents get a little panicked and they think, oh my goodness, I need to meet my child’s needs all the time. So I always like to say, the research actually tells us that it’s only 30% of the time that we need to do this. So kind of let parents off the hook a little bit, you can relax, you can breathe. 30% of the time if we are emotionally responsive to kids’ needs that is actually good enough. That’s what the research tells us.

Amy: Wow. That is so big. So this is what helps them feel comfortable with themselves and with parents and then going out into the outside world. So those are all really big things. And we’re going to be okay if we’re not doing it 100% of the time.

Sarah: Absolutely, yes.

Amy: That’s very comforting. Okay, I love it. Okay, so how do these early relationships kind of impact their brain development? Does attachment affect how their brain develops? How are those things related?

Sarah: Yeah, 100%. So basically the responsiveness of our parenting, our early years, really shapes the way that our brains grow and the way that they develop. So very young babies don’t have what we would call explicit memory. So they can’t recall things. They’re not going to be able to talk to us about things that happen to them. But if you always do feed your baby in the same chair for example and you use the same spoon, and let’s say you’re always lifting up your shirt to breastfeed or they see warming a bottle they start to get excited every time they see you do that.

So every time you sit in that chair, they’re kicking their little legs and they’re getting really excited. And even their digestive system will start to prepare for that food. So this is implicit memory. Your baby can’t recall anything. They can’t tell you about it but they know what’s coming next based on those cues that you’re giving them and based on their previous experiences. So every time we are responding to our child’s needs, either physical or emotional needs we are creating these implicit memories.

So they’re internalizing that experience and it’s being stored away in the brain and in the nervous system. And they’re learning either I’m safe in this situation and with this person or I’m not safe in this situation with this person. So if your child has lots and lots of early experiences of being really effectively soothed and cared for and are feeling really safe with you they’re going to learn that people are safe and the world is safe and they’re safe. And their nervous system is also going to be soothed by your nervous system.

And they’ll learn that other people can help them. And that’s what starts to actually begin to develop in the brain, those neural pathways that we need to learn how to self-regulate eventually. So every single positive experience is building those pathways towards self-regulation. Now, if a child doesn’t have that though, if they experience a really stressful situation and then their needs are not able to be met by their parents, they’re not effectively soothed, they’re not helped to feel really safe then that’s the internal experience that they’re going to have.

So the brain will then remember that this is not a safe situation and this is not a safe person. And for a baby, needs not being met is incredibly unsafe, they can’t survive without us. So that’s a huge threat to survival which means that stress response remains activated. And then over time what happens is, that affects the responsivity of the nervous system and of the stress response.

So you may find that those children are more easily activated, they have more sensitive nervous systems potentially. And some of those pathways that we need to move towards self-regulation are not actually being effectively built. And so it changes the way that we are able to develop self-regulation as we grow.

Amy: Wow. Which is huge because we want kids to know that and adults and everyone. But this is still one of those things as we’re kind of stressing now, oh, no, am I doing this well enough. This is one of those things that we don’t have to be perfect at if we’re getting it a lot of the time.

Sarah: Absolutely not, no, 30%. I drill this into people all the time, 30%, this is your goal.

Amy: Good, okay. So we don’t have to be perfect, you guys, and our kids can still develop these really, really healthy attachments with us. Okay, so good. So different areas of the brain, how are they impacted by this emotional regulation because you talked about how babies are learning the self-regulation or children as they’re kind of experiencing that with us, kind of getting it from us. What other areas of the brain are being impacted by that and their emotional regulation?

Sarah: Right. So when we’re talking about emotional regulation we’re usually talking about two main areas of the brain. And I like to talk about them as the thinking brain and the feeling brain. So the thinking brain is our prefrontal cortex. So this is the area at the front of the brain. And it’s responsible for all our higher order thinking, so planning and reasoning and logic and decision making and language, things like that. And then we have our limbic system and the amygdala. And this is essentially our emotional control center. So it’s responsible for all things emotions within the brain.

When we experience any kind of threat or we perceive that something is threatening, so we’ve learned over time that this is not a safe environment or a safe situation for us. Our amygdala gets activated, gets a little worked up and so this chain of events gets triggered within the brain and within the nervous system that is designed to keep us safe. So we probably all know about fight, flight, freeze, so this is the fight, flight, freeze response or the stress response. So our body then starts to kind of go into action and it gets prepared to deal with the threat and so it tries to either fight, run away, so that’s flight.

Or it freezes in really strange situations where it thinks it’s not going to be able to run away and it’s not going to be able to fight, it will actually kind of shut down. So that’s a last ditch attempt, I like to talk about it as a possum playing dead. Maybe if I just stay really still and pretend that I’m already dead, someone will leave me alone, this predator will leave me alone. So that’s our freeze response. So that’s kind of what happens when we become stressed.

And then a range of things will happen within the body and it makes us feel pretty awful at the time, makes children feel pretty awful and out of control, heart rate goes up and respiration goes up. We start to get all sweaty and tense and we feel generally pretty horrible. Digestion slows down, all of those things because our brain and our body is preparing to just act. There’s no time for thinking when we’re like this. So what happens then is that that prefrontal cortex, the thinking brain goes offline and we’re being completely ruled by our emotions. We’re just basically in survival mode at that stage.

And so this is often when we see big emotions and big behaviors from children because they’ve completely lost control of that prefrontal cortex and that fight, flight, freeze response is just dictating what they are doing. They really don’t have any control anymore at that point. The body is just trying to keep them safe. So this is what we often see when children are having meltdowns and this is what we’ll often talk about when we’re talking about emotional regulation, that they need to get more control over those responses which are largely actually out of their control so this is why it becomes quite tricky.

Amy: Wow. Okay, so yes, I have totally seen this. And when you see a child throwing a tantrum and they’re not really in a space to be reasoned with. So that’s why it just kind of shuts that down and they go into just that fight, flight or freeze. Wow, okay, so how then do we help them, wherever we’re at now, so we know that attachment’s important, what does that look like? How do we maybe work on that co-regulation? What does that look like in trying to help children figure that out and keep supporting that secure attachment?

Sarah: So basically what we want to do is we want to use our own nervous system to regulate theirs. So this is what we’re talking about when we talk about the process of co-regulation. So co-regulation I think people get a little bit confused and overwhelmed by this idea sometimes. But co-regulation is essentially just the process of meeting a child’s attachment needs. It is being close by, being that safe haven for them and giving them the confidence and the support they need to then when that big emotional kind of – I don’t like to say outburst but when that outburst is over they can then go and explore again and feel safe enough to do that.

So it’s really just kind of following our children’s cues, trying to work out what they need in a situation and providing it for them, which sounds simple but is not actually very easy at all, quite a difficult thing to do even though it is simple. And because children don’t really have that ability to self-regulate when they’re young, they learn that process of self-regulation through that repeated co-regulation from us by essentially lending us some of our more calm regulated nervous system. And that’s when we’re, like we were talking about earlier, building those neural pathways.

So that after a long time, it does take a long time, years, after years of doing it, there’s multiple instances of co-regulation they then are able to then experience that enough that they can internalize that experience and they are able to go and do that for themselves but it does require us to not become dysregulated in the moment which is probably the hardest part of the whole process and probably the hardest part of parenting in general I think is trying to remain regulated yourself.

So even if you’re feeling angry or you’re feeling frustrated, not kind of letting that take control and not letting that activate your fight, flight, freeze response to the point where you’re out of control as well. Because then you have dysregulation happening. So yeah, it is a tricky process.

Amy: Yes, okay. So staying calm, which is really fun to do when you’re at Walmart or something and your child’s throwing a tantrum and people are looking at you and being like, why? Anyway, yes, that has never happened to me ever. I think we’ve all been there and we’ve all had that experience. So remaining calm and lending them that. Is there anything that is helpful around touch or bringing them in or being with them or does it kind of depend on the child? I’m just wondering, if they’re feeling you breathing or anything like that, is any of that helpful?

Sarah: Yeah. So it does depend on the child very much and it’s very important when we’re offering co-regulation that we’re trying to really change to our child’s needs. And everybody’s going to have different sensory needs and different needs of space, that we will be in that situation where we’re trying to comfort a child and they’re saying, “Go away, leave me alone.” And we’ll be like, “But I just want to give a cuddle.” And they don’t necessarily want that at the time. So it does depend on your individual child and what their needs are.

But there are also a couple of things that we can do and there is, I guess, a framework that I like to follow when it comes to co-regulation to help me know what to do. And basically it comes down to ensuring that you are providing your child with those pieces of safety that they need. So if they’re dysregulated it’s because they have encountered or they have encountered what they believe is a threat and so they don’t feel safe. So we need to just be focused on providing safety for them so that they can come back into a regulated state.

So a couple of kinds of things that we can think about in terms of the way that our body is offering that piece of safety or whether our body might be actually providing them with cues of danger. So a lot of the time when we are getting frustrated or we are kind of thinking, when is this going to end, I don’t know if I can cope with this. And all these things are going through your head and you’re like, I have to stay calm and I have to do this and you get quite overwhelmed yourself. And so chances are they can tell. Children can tell. There will be these subtle cues that you’re giving off that say to your child, this person is not necessarily safe in this moment.

So one of the things that we can do is to follow this framework. So we think about five things from the top of my head, presence, so are you fully present with your child or are you really distracted? So if you are trying to deal with a meltdown, and I know this is really tough because meltdowns often happen already at times when we’re busy, we’re cooking dinner or we’re on the phone or we’re doing something. But if your child can see that you’re not fully attending to them and you’re distracted that doesn’t feel very safe because they’re thinking, well, if mom’s not paying attention how is she going to help me?

So we need to think about am I fully present and really paying attention to what my child needs here? Then we look at things like our body and our face and our voice. Is your face really relaxed? So you’re kind of frowning at your child and grimacing and you’re like, I need to just get through this. Because that doesn’t look safe. If you saw someone frowning on the street you’re not going to go and approach them are you? You’re thinking that person probably needs some space. So thinking about what message your face is giving and I’m so terrible at this one myself and I need to work on that always.

Posture is another one. So do you have an open kind of relaxed posture or are you kind of standing over the top of your child? Or do you have your fists clenched at your sides because you’re thinking I’ll just kind of grin and bear it type of situation? Are your hands raised? And you may not have any intention of hurting a child with your hands obviously. But if you’re kind of waving your hands around or you’re getting a little bit worked up like I do and you talk a lot with your hands, that doesn’t necessarily portray safety. That actually says, this person’s a little bit unpredictable and they might not be safe.

So thinking about your posture and even things like standing over somebody. Kids don’t feel very safe, we’re so much bigger than them. So bending down on to their level is always going to be much more helpful if they’re feeling upset. Then we think of our voice and this one’s pretty obvious, if you’re yelling that’s not particularly safe. But also your tone, sometimes we try to say the right words but maybe they don’t sound quite as nice as we would like. And our tone doesn’t quite match what we’re saying. So kids pick up our tone faster than they pick up the words.

So once they hear that negative tone they’re probably not hearing the words that go along with it at all, so tone is really important. And then the last one that we look at is movement. So are you kind of moving in a slow way or are you pacing up and down or are you moving around really quickly around them? Because that kind of frantic movement doesn’t feel very safe when you’re quite dysregulated. It feels like you’re about to go and do something. And you’re primed for action and so that’s not necessarily safe either. So there you are, those are the five kind of things.

And I always think about these things myself if I’m – my children are not immune to meltdowns, they have them as well. I have dealt with many myself. And these are the things that I always think about is trying to think about those five areas and am I being safe right now? And so my child receiving what I’m doing as safe and that’s the most important thing. You may know very well that your child is safe in your care but it’s about do they feel safe and are they perceiving what’s happening as safe? That is the most important thing.

Amy: That is so good and I love that list to just kind of do the little checklist for ourselves and make sure. Yeah, and I’m not a yeller, I’ve never been a yeller. But I do have maybe a tone of my voice that’s a little bit different when I’m feeling a little stronger about something than my normal tone.

Sarah: Yes, the mom voice, right?

Amy: I’m sure that my children can tell the difference in that, so just watching that. I love it. That’s so helpful. This is so good. There’s a lot of talk out there about emotional intelligence. Is this part of developing that or how are we helping children develop their emotional intelligence?

Sarah: Absolutely. This is a big part of working on emotional regulation is working on some of those more basic emotional intelligence skills to begin with. So when we’re talking about emotional intelligence what we’re talking about essentially is our ability to identify emotions with ours and others. And then use those to kind of guide our looking at our behavior. So we need to be able to identify our kids’ emotions and be really [inaudible] to how they’re going but also our own. So we need to develop our kids’ emotional intelligence but we also need to work on our own emotional intelligence a lot of the time.

And we need to be able to recognize our own cues, how do we know when we’re becoming dysregulated so that we can actually go and take a little bit of a break. Because if we’re dysregulated ourselves we’re then not able to support our children or we’re going to end up escalating the situation. And a lot of us I think because we never learned these skills when we were children we struggle with them a little bit now as adults. We don’t know. We’re not really tuned into our own internal cues a lot of the time.

But a lot of us, we were told, “Just stop that crying, just don’t bother me with that. Go to your room and deal with it over there.” And so we didn’t really learn those and we learned to just kind of ignore a lot of those internal cues because we may have learned that nobody was really going to help us through them. So we’ve become a little bit disconnected from that part of ourselves. So developing our own emotional intelligence I would say is the most important thing that we can start with is really starting to build our own self-awareness, really trying to work on reducing our stress as well.

So this is a big thing for us as parents that we often overlook and we always kind of we think we’ll do that later, we’ll deal with the children first. But in reality when we are really, really stressed we are not able to regulate very well. If that stress response is always activated within us, how on Earth are we going to help our children to support them through all these big emotions and we don’t have any energy left because we’re dealing with so much of our own stuff? So being able to manage our own stress as well, that’s a big part of emotional intelligence.

And being able to kind of work on that self-regulation that ability to monitor how we’re going and then manage it before it gets out of hand. I think those are probably the biggest things when it comes to emotional intelligence that we need to think about for ourselves. And then once we have that for us, we can support our children with it. But until we do that we’re struggling, we’re struggling to teach it to them when we don’t know ourselves. And that’s a big part of why we get dysregulated as well, because we go, “Oh my God, what do I do? I don’t know what to do in this situation.” And then we freeze or we lash out and we do things that we don’t want to do and we act in ways that don’t align with the way that we like to parent.

Amy: That is so good. So if we were going to give parents, teachers just one or two things to maybe go start doing because I think this is so valuable, I love what you’re saying and it’s something we have control over because sometimes I think parenting feels like a long game. And we’re going to start trying to teach this thing and then we’ll see how it turns out in three years or something. But starting to work on ourselves and improve our own emotional intelligence seems like something that we could start with right away and something we have more control over.

What would be maybe just the first couple tips you would recommend for someone to start working on that? Is it reading a book? Is it listening to a podcast? Is it going to therapy? What would you recommend for someone who’s wanting to improve their own emotional intelligence?

Sarah: I think I mean there are lots of books. There are certainly some great names in this space they could probably learn a lot from. But I think more than anything when it comes to emotional intelligence we need to start by doing. We need to actually do things rather than getting information. I think as parents particularly we focus a lot on, I need more information about this and I’m going to go and read all the books and listen to all the podcasts and all the blogs. And it’s important, knowledge is important but at the same time being able to put that knowledge into practice is where it becomes really tricky.

So I think focusing too much on learning more and more and more information sometimes just overwhelms us and it makes us think, it’s like the 30% thing, if we start thinking about having to do this right all the time, I need to get it perfect and then we just get so stressed out. So I think just doing things is the most important thing. I like to start by kind of talking to people about start labeling your emotions. This is often the simplest thing that we can do. And trying to link our emotions to our experiences because like I said earlier, we’re a bit disconnected from that often.

And we don’t necessarily associate the physical sensations that we’re experiencing with the emotion that goes with it. So starting with that is probably the most important thing. I talk to parents about doing it with children as well and labeling their emotions, but labeling our own emotions is just as important. So saying out loud to ourself, “I’m feeling frustrated right now.” Rather than getting stuck in this negative cycle of I can’t cope with this and I’m doing a terrible job. Just acknowledge, this is hard. Have some self-compassion for yourself.

I am feeling frustrated right now because of x, y, z, it’s the most important thing we can do. Otherwise we end up beating ourselves up and we get stuck like I said, in these terrible negative cycles where we’re just shaming ourselves for not being able to do something that we’ve never learned. If you’ve never learned it, how do you do it?

Amy: I love it too because it seems it’s almost separating it from this is my life or this is who I am or I’m so bad at this or whatever. And you’re just saying, “I’m feeling this”, which it’s just a temporary thing. It makes it feel temporary. It’s just an emotion that I’m having as opposed to it being who I am, my identity or my life or whatever which feels very powerful. It gives you I think, maybe just a step back and a little more perspective so I love that idea.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely because emotions are fleeting. They don’t last forever even though it feels like it at the time. So yeah, the way that we speak about emotions both for ourselves and for our children is really, really important, absolutely.

Amy: This has been so good. Thank you. Is there anything else you would just want to leave with, something I should have asked you that I didn’t or something you just want to leave everyone with?

Sarah: Look, I think that the most important thing that I would hope people can take away today is that brains grow and develop in relationship with other people, it’s not in isolation. Brains aren’t made, they’re not born and there’s no such thing as a brain that develops outside of a relationship with anybody else. And this is the thing that we need to remember, that we need those repeated instances of co-regulation from other people. And that we don’t ever outgrow that, even as adults we need co-regulation. When I’m upset I will call someone and talk to them about that.

So self-regulation is not necessarily about going and managing things on your own. It’s about being able to recognize when you need to do something, when you need support as well. So yeah, just remembering that these things all develop in a relationship with other people and it’s never actually too late either to start developing emotional regulation skills. A lot of the time people will say to me, “I think it’s too late. I think I’ve left it too late.” My child is eight or nine or 13 or whatever it might be and it’s too late for them now. It’s never ever too late.

This is the amazing thing about brains is that they can teach and grow and change. And if they’re then developing a relationship they can also change in a relationship so this is the most important thing for us to remember. It’s never ever too late.

Amy: That just filled me with just so much hope and courage and we could do this, you guys. That’s amazing and I love that brains are not made in isolation. This is so good. And I see it in myself. I use my sister or one of my best friends for co-regulation when I’m having a hard time. And I need to do that so that then I can come back in a place of calm for my children because they’re having their own stresses. I’m having major stresses in my life and I can do that. So this has been so good.

Okay, tell us where people can find you. Where is the best place for people to find you if they want to come and follow more of your work and hear more of your amazing ideas and suggestions?

Sarah: So you can find me on Instagram @sarahconwaypsychology is my Instagram handle. Can also find me on Facebook, over there I’m Mindful Little Minds though. So a little bit different depending on where you want to look for me. And of course my website as well, there’s a blog there and I’ve got some free resources there for people if they wanted to get started on the journey. There’s some free calm down cards that people can grab for their kiddos if you want to start teaching them some calming strategy and some emotional regulation skills.

Amy: That is so perfect, okay, and we will include you guys, those links for you in the show notes and so you can just click right on those and head right over to find Sarah and follow her on Instagram. I am already doing it because she’s amazing so come join us and learn from her. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me today. It’s been delightful to talk to you.

Sarah: And thank you so much for having me and I loved it.

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Thank you for hanging out with me today for this fun chat on Raising Healthy Kid Brains. If you want to see more of what we’re doing to support kiddos and their amazing brains, come visit us on our website planningplaytime.com. See you next week.