Polysecure

by Jessica Fern

  Even a small shift in the way you talk to yourself has significant physical and mental health benefits and can influence your ability to regulate your feelings, thoughts, and behavior under stress. Positive self-talk is not about placating yourself, trying to falsely boost your ego or being self-delusional. It is about having an inner dialogue that is forgiving, understanding, flexible and holds a larger, often more realistic, perspective than the negative, defeated or abusive self-talk that we often tolerate as the inner status quo. Expressed delight for yourself would mean being able to see your strengths, positive attributes, qualities and ways of being that you can be proud of and grateful for, as well as seeing where there is still room for self-improvement. When we delight in our children or our partners, we don’t necessarily see them as perfect. In fact, we usually see them with all their amazing, difficult and quirky qualities and choose to take delight in their fullness, contradictions and all. Can you do this for yourself?

  I see the inner critic and shame as the largest obstacles to rewiring our inner narratives to reflect more self-expressed delight. Trauma and insecure attachment give birth to our inner critic and shame, and, just as positive self-talk has health benefits, negative self-talk can have far-reaching negative impacts on our health and can actually activate our threat system, spiraling us into the fight/flight/freeze/appease response, just from our own thinking. It is difficult to embody self-worth when we have parts of ourselves that incessantly beat us up for what we’ve done, what we haven’t done, or how we look. The inner critic is the voice in our head that is harsh, mean, critical, unsympathetic, punishing, shaming and “shoulding.” Shame is the part of us that feels beat up by the inner critic, accepting what it says as true and believing that we are unworthy, not enough, too much, fundamentally broken and maybe even better off dead.

  Shame researcher Brené Brown makes the important distinction between guilt and shame, with guilt being the perspective that I’ve done something wrong, which can be helpful and motivating, and shame the perspective that I am wrong, which can be debilitating and paralyzing.73 When we have critical or perfectionistic parts of ourselves that spew inner negativity and then shameful parts that absorb these thoughts as gospel, finding love and happiness in ourselves can feel nearly impossible. I’ve come to see our inner critic as a form of emotional autoimmunity. When someone has an autoimmune condition, the immune system goes into overdrive and the body starts attacking itself instead of protecting itself from outside invasion. When we inquire into the motivation of the inner critic, it is usually a part of us that wants to protect us, keep us safe or have us be successful, but its methods are actually self-harming and counterproductive to its protective intention. Shame is like a weakened immune system that will catch an emotional cold through even the smallest of insults, neutral feedback or questioning from another. Even though the part of us experiencing shame often feels powerless, it is quite powerful in its capacity to eclipse our ability to connect with our self and with others. Shame can function like a form of deflated narcissism where any and all phenomena in the world are taken as evidence for how you are not worthy or how you are fundamentally failing, flawed or broken. Both the inner critic and shame can sabotage our relationships, because when we are living from these parts we are usually unable to relate authentically or take responsibility for our actions.

  But remember that we are more than these parts. The inner critical and shameful parts of us can have a prominent impact through the ways they shape and distort our view of self, other and the world, and when in the driver’s seat these parts can create much havoc, but they are not the totality of who we are. Just as our attachment styles are not the fullness of who we are, these parts are also just an aspect of ourselves that can be healed and transformed. Therapeutic modalities such as compassion-focused therapy, narrative therapy and Internal Family Systems use techniques to externalize and engage in dialogue with these parts to gain a better understanding of the ways in which they are either trying to protect us or are still holding pain, traumas and emotional burdens that can be released. When doing this kind of inner work, the grip that these parts have on us begins to loosen and more expressed delight can begin to shine through. As problematic parts get revised, unburdened, updated or transformed, other parts of our self that have been disowned or exiled, such as our self-esteem, voice, joy, enthusiasm, creativity or sexuality can also be reclaimed and integrated, thus fortifying our ability to better enact the strategies and positive self-talk that encourages self-interest, excitement, play and self-delight. It is just as important to cultivate the parts of us that can have self-compassion and help us function in securely attached ways as working with our critical and shameful parts, and I will touch on this in the next section.

  Questions to Consider

  What does expressed delight look like for you right now?

  How could you increase your self-expressed delight?

  Do you struggle with critical and shameful inner parts that sabotage your ability to value and appreciate yourself?

  What would become more possible for you in regard to yourself and your relationships if expressed delight was more central to your inner experience?

  Things to Try and to Experiment With

  Take yourself on a date or pamper yourself with something that you genuinely enjoy.

  Listen to self-hypnosis tracks or positive affirmations that are aligned with what you want to feel about yourself.

  Write yourself a love letter or make a list of all the things you appreciate about yourself.

  Start a gratitude practice and make sure to include yourself as the object of gratitude.

  Start working with your inner critic and shame through modalities such as Internal Family Systems, narrative therapy or compassion-focused therapy, which focus on inner parts work.

  Check out Rick Hanson’s Hardwiring Happiness or Joe Dispenza’s Becoming Supernatural, which both focus on how to create positive changes within your inner landscape.

  Start to identify the parts of you that do function in secure ways and focus on how to make them more prominent in your life. What daily practices or perspectives can you take on that bring your preferred expression of self more to the front and center in your life?

  Let yourself laugh and seek out humor.

  A: Attuning to Yourself

  Attunement is at the heart of secure attachment. In its absence, attachment security ceases to be possible. When there are early childhood attachment ruptures, requisite developments in a person’s ability to tune into themself and regulate their inner states can become hindered. When our childhood needs are not met from the outside and our attachment figures are unable to help us learn how to identify and label our inner experiences in order to make sense of them and soothe ourselves, as adults we can then struggle with knowing how to feel our own feelings, identify our own needs, and calm down our own body, mind and heart in the way a nurturing caretaker would have. We can also run into considerable relational difficulty when we continue to have an “outside-in” approach to getting our needs met, expecting that our partners act as a substitute for our own inner nurturer. When we are able to tune in and tend to our needs from the inside first, we may still seek outward support, comfort and guidance from our partners, but our fundamental well-being and sense of being OK are not dependent on it.

  When applied to the self, attunement is our ability to turn inward in order to become receptive and aware of our interior world. Self-attunement is the inner inquiry into what you are feeling, needing, thinking and experiencing. Self-attunement facilitates self-knowing, which furthers our ability to self-regulate and soothe our own physiological and emotional states, as well as respond appropriately to our environment. Regardless of a person’s specific attachment style, people with attachment insecurity will all struggle to some degree with emotional regulation and self-soothing. People with more attachment anxiety tend to seek outward regulation from others—they want to be taken care of, try to overproc
ess with partners, look for someone fix or take away what they’re going through, or can even seek someone else to just tell them what to do. People with an anxious attachment style can struggle with being able to hold and sit with their own feelings and so, like a game of emotional hot potato, they try to pass off their emotions to their partners in order to diffuse their own discomfort. Seeking this external regulation from others is often at the exclusion of their own self-regulation and their own sense of self.

  People functioning from a dismissive attachment style steer clear of trying to emotionally regulate with others because, in many ways, they don’t even see it as a possibility. The co-regulation that a child needs and would experience with an attachment figure was not available to them, so they learned to take care of themselves by disengaging from others and taking space to regulate. From the outside, it may look like people with avoidant attachment are able to self-regulate well since they are comfortable on their own, but usually they are not actually self-attuning and self-soothing as much as they are autoregulating—that is, partaking in activities that are more about zoning out or tuning out in order to dissociate from their internal states than tuning into and intentionally working with their internal states.

  Types of Regulation

  Auto-Regulation

  (It just happens)

  Self-stimulation or self-soothing done more automatically than consciously.

  Autoregulation is done alone, so there is no interpersonal stress.

  Can be similar to overfocusing on an object or task and can be dissociative or zoning out.

  Examples: Thumb-sucking, averting eye contact, reading, doing art, watching TV, alcohol, drugs, masturbating, daydreaming, overeating, swiping or scrolling on your phone.

  External Regulation

  (You do it)

  Reaching for another to help regulate and soothe you.

  Interactive, but only focusing on one person attuning to the other at a time.

  Can overfocus on either the self or on the other.

  Examples: Being held and soothed by a caregiver, talking with a friend about your problems, listening to a live talk or music, getting a massage.

  Interactive Regulation

  (We do it)

  Mutual or co-regulation with another where both people are regulating each other.

  Skin-to-skin and eye-to-eye contact.

  Both people are attuning to each other.

  Examples: Dancing with a partner, sex, having a mutual dialogue, musicians playing together, cooking together.

  Self-Regulation

  (I do it)

  Regulating one’s own state through active or intentional techniques that are self-soothing or stimulating.

  Ability to exhibit self-control through managing bodily or emotional impulses.

  Examples: Calming down through breath control, mental techniques (e.g., reframing), muscle relaxation, vocal control. Some of the autoregulation behaviors can also be examples of self-regulation when they are intentional.

  TABLE 9.1: Types of regulation, adapted from Stan Tatkin’s “The Four Regulation (Self-Care) Strategies” from We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, True Connection, and Enduring Love.

  People with a preoccupied style learned that in order to survive they needed to be vigilant about reaching out towards others, often at the expense of losing their sense of self, whereas people with dismissive or fearful-avoidant attachment styles learned the danger or futility of reaching out to others and so in retreating into themselves they lose their sense of other. In my practice, I see that regardless of a person’s starting point, all of those with insecure attachment styles need support with knowing themselves better. People with insecure attachment need guidance in connecting more with their authentic needs, preferences and desires instead of defaulting into their more reflexive insecure defense mechanisms. Just as we need techniques that support us in quieting down and transforming our inner critic, we also need strategies that enhance our inner nurturer. Even when we haven’t experienced nurturing from others, we still have an innate caregiving behavioral system that we can access and animate through practice. With self-compassion we can learn how to re-parent ourselves in ways we may have never received. All of the insecure styles will benefit from practicing self-attunement and learning how to truly self-regulate and self-soothe, rather than turning to distraction, deflection or avoidance. There can be a healing effect of being with discomfort, of contacting pain or pleasure without collapsing or disconnecting, that can allow people to access their own inner safe haven and secure base. Each of the insecure attachment styles also has some specific ways that they can further grow.

  Ways that each of the insecure attachment styles can focus on growth:

  Preoccupied

  Focus on strengthening your sense of self. You can begin to do this through identifying your own values, needs, likes and dislikes. What makes you tick, what are your dreams, talents, callings and purposes? Exploring personality tests like the enneagram or Myers-Briggs as well as knowing your love languages can also support this process.

  Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries! The anxious style tends to have more porous boundaries regarding input where other people are defining you, as well as on the output where you are inserting yourself too far into another person’s emotional, physical or mental space. Creating more distinct, but not rigid, boundaries is important for learning how to stay in your own skin while being connected to others, rather than leaving yourself behind to be with others. Also, be aware of not letting other people occupy more of your internal space than you are.

  Recognize when you are abandoning yourself and learn techniques to come back into your own body and your own internal world. Body-based meditations and awareness practices can support you being better able to inhabit your own body.

  When co-regulating with partners, make sure that it is reciprocal and that you are not either over-caretaking at the expense of yourself or asking them to take care of you without regard for themselves.

  Work on being able to receive love. Even though someone with a preoccupied attachment style is more likely to complain that they are not getting enough love or attention, when it is given, they often struggle with how to really let it in and receive it. What obstacles or defensive mechanisms arise when love, connection or nourishment is actually being offered?

  Learn techniques to ground and work with your anxiety instead of projecting it onto others or directing your anxiety into the relational space.

  Dismissive

  Needing support does not mean that you are weak, needy or less than. People with this style can carry a lot of toxic shame about needing others or having any needs at all. Can you begin to accept that wanting support or attention from others is alright, even healthy, and not a negative reflection on your abilities, competence or independence? I invite you to allow the fullness of your humanness.

  With people who are safe, begin to take the risk of revealing and sharing more of yourself so that people can get a glimpse into your internal world. This could take the form of relaxing some of your more rigid boundaries and letting more of yourself out.

  Also work on letting people in more. Let people have an impact on how you feel or allow their experiences, needs, opinions or feedback to impact your perspective.

  Work with transforming your self-reliant parts through relying more on or leaning into your partners for support, nourishment and connection. It’s OK to start with small requests. I almost had a panic attack the first time I asked my partner to pick up a yogurt for me on the way over to my house. To me, this seemed like an unreasonable ask, even though he was the one who asked me if I needed anything from the store that he was already stopping at.

  Wake up your body. Often people with the dismissive style exist primarily in their heads, being cut off from the neck down. Exploring movement practices, body-based meditations and awareness practices can help you wake up your body and begin to allow and tolerate a whole range of sensati
ons and feelings.

  Learn how to articulate your feelings and needs. This is easier said than done, since this is a developmental capacity that you have to learn and grow, not just an easy behavioral shift or a switch that you can turn on. Please be patient with yourself.

  Fearful-Avoidant

  People with this style either experience alternating aspects of the dismissive and preoccupied styles, or both can occur simultaneously, so try some or all of the above suggestions for both the preoccupied and the dismissive styles that feel relevant to you. In addition to the above suggestions you can also:

  Focus on building an internal sense of safety where you have a bodily felt sense that you are safe and that you can relax, even if it is just with yourself at first. When there has been trauma, this usually requires the support of a professional.

  Build an inner sense of protection. Doing inner work can support you in identifying the parts of you that can protect you that are not harmful to you or others. It can also be helpful to invite these protective parts to become more central to your daily experience. Remembering a person or a time when you felt protected and allowing that memory to come alive in your body can support you in having a tangible somatic experience of protection that you can access when you need it. Even when people have had parents who were harmful or not protective, there is usually someone we can identify as having felt a sense of protection with, whether it was another relative, a teacher or someone in our community. If you are truly unable to access any memories, people or times when you felt protected, explore the mythical, fictional or spiritual realms, where there might be a character that you resonate with or a spiritual and archetypal energy that you can associate protection with.