#1020 - Jessica Baum - Why We Fall for the Wrong People

28:27Would you have rather grown up with less money but more emotional availability? I really think that all of them would say yes. And it's so ruthless because, again, it seems and is noble for a parent who's saying, why, so you're saying that working five days a week, 10-hour shifts for two decades to provide for a family of four, you're saying that that wasn't right, that wasn't something that's noble? Yes, of course, of course it is. But if you ask the kids when they grow up to be adults, if they start to tune into themselves, what it is that they needed more of, it probably wasn't a bigger birthday party.

29:02It was for mom or dad to pick them up and hold them. It wasn't for more lifts to soccer practice. It was to have their needs met when they felt scared. And it's kind of a ruthless realization. A hundred percent. And it's also, you know, it's having that parent allow you to be upset without fixing you or changing you or giving you a cookie or buying. It's that parent that has the ability to be with you through your emotional experience. And it's the feeling of with that gives a child safety. And it's the feeling of with that gives us all safety. And I think that parents who didn't experience their parents being with them, they're doing the best they can and they're providing and they will do what they can for their child.

29:53So it's kind of being passed down, but you're just not aware of it until you slow down and do the work. Like I've slowed down and done a lot of work and I'm sure there'll be much more work in my life. um it never ends but now i know how to be with people in such a deeper way because i've had people be with me in such a deep and profound way that it's cultivated that ability to give that to another what do you say to people who call the inner child stuff woo woo you know in safe i talk about memory and like i get so deep into interpersonal neurobiology and neuroscience I talk about implicit memory.

30:32I talk about sensations. I think the body keeps the score. But if you don't want to call it your inner child, we still need to start to look at how memory systems work in your body and how that your memory system is constantly speaking to you. Your past is internally present through these streams. And so that's not woo-woo. That's science. And I got the science to back it up. So you want to take the word inner child out or little me out, we still need to work with memory because memory, our memory, our past is living right now in our present. It's alive, it's in our body, and it's right here all the time.

31:09How is that encoded? Mostly through sensation. So when we're born, we're born as right hemisphere, more creatures, and we're not, as humans, we're not like fully developed. We don't come out with like a fully developed nervous system or fully developed organs, we come out, like think of it, we're like these little like sensing beings and we don't store explicit memory till like little bit later on four or five. So explicit memory is like memory, like a movie screen. We only store sensations. We can only, our body can only store sensations from womb to about four and we're storing, I forgot the statistics, but so much more sensational memory, even in this second, second, second, second between you and me, more sensations are being stored than like explicit memory.

32:04So we're constantly storing sensations as memory. Then if we're, we're growing up in a home where there's trauma and we're not processing our emotions, these sensations go into our body. They get tucked into our, our gut, our heart, our fascia, our body, and they stay there. And they'll stay there until we can tune into our body and become embodied again. And so these sensational memory streams and the sensations moving through our body, that's just the science. And those are the things that we have to start being more aware of if we want to heal. Okay. Why do we confuse chaos with chemistry? like what is it about this sort of sparkiness that happens in relationships and how do we get sort of taken taken aside by it yeah and it's not just chaos i would say it's intensity with chemistry so it can be chaos so if you grew up in a home that had a lot of chaos and you meet someone even if they don't appear like they have chaos on on the surface but they have chaos underneath you're going to be attracted to them because that's your familiar.

33:14So it's, it's less about, it's more about how your familiar matches with somebody else's familiar. But I think intensity, um, love bombing intensity, um, euphoric chemicals being released in our brain, all of that, like someone getting close really fast, all of that can be feel like love, but it's not true vulnerability and it's not true closeness, but it can feel so euphoric inside that like we're kind of blinded by it. And depending on what you're familiar is, you're going to be attracted to someone and that intensity will feel like home. It's funny because my book is like safe and attachment informed guide to building more secure relationships and coming home to yourself and others.

34:03And there's a part in the book where I talk about hugging my partner and feeling like I was home. And like he was, he represented the home I wanted because he was so attentive, but he also brought me home to all of my earliest experiences. And I think a lot of relationships do that. Like when you hear a lot of big people talk, it's like our closest relationships will bring up our earliest wounds. They will bring up our earliest patterns. They will recreate those dynamics. They will literally bring you home yeah it's a a very again it's like so fucking poetically ironic right that you have this early intimate relationship with your caregiver and then you go through life to try and find one that you know hopefully transcends and includes and elevates what you did before to only realize like i don't know some groundhog day thing i'm I'm fucking back to where I started.

35:02Like, I mean, they say it's the same thing all over again. I mean, it's 22 decades, three decades later, and I'm doing the same thing. Well, that's exactly why I wrote this book, because, like, I've been, I mean, we've all been there. Like, here I am again, right in my core wound. I'm being left. I'm not good enough. I'm unworthy, right? And it's science. I mean, until we heal the original wound, until we go back, until we become more embodied, until we grieve what we didn't get, we will try to recreate it. Like we will seek out something that actually we think will protect us. And ironically, it will recreate it.

35:40So it's like a little, it's kind of like, it's, yeah, it's a little twisted. I completely agree. The two things that I've taken away, at least so far, this confusion between familiarity and safety, I think is it familiarity is not safety it is familiarity um and this confusion between intensity and intimacy that that that is also not the same thing uh and often I would imagine that the intensity is born out of some of the familiarity too that you your ability to be able to tolerate that like your tolerance window for bad stuff that you're familiar with is actually going to be greater than for bad stuff that you're not familiar with like you have this um a palate, you know, like you're a fine diner or something and you have this particular, ooh, Italian food.

36:28I can really eat a lot of that, but I'm not so, you know, Chinese. I'm not so used to. Yeah. Well, and also like, let's say you're familiar is violence or you're familiar is neglect or you're familiar is, I don't know what it is. When you're in a relationship, you regress and think about a young kid. Like they don't have the choice to be like, you know what, you're neglecting me. I'm just going to go over here. They just keep trying and trying and trying. So you just keep trying with the same pattern with someone who can't give you what you need because that's literally what you did as a kid. So that's why you have more capacity for it.

37:04If you didn't get neglect or you didn't get rejection or shame as a kid, and someone starts to shame you, you're like, this doesn't feel familiar. I don't even need to work through this. I'm going to go over there. You're more likely to walk over. That's so clever. Yes, yes, yes. Your capacity for tolerating familiar mistreatment is greater as well. Absolutely. And I think that there's another piece, like if you grew up with neglect or abuse or anything and someone comes along and they present as like the perfect parent, but they're also feeding a very young part of your brain all this attention.

37:42they're flooding your brain and they're showing up as Mr. or Mrs. Wonderful. You're now projecting like, this is what I didn't get in my childhood. Look how wonderful this person is showing up. They're filling a developmental part of your brain, a wound. They're filling it. And then what happens later in the relationship, if they change and become abusive or whatever happens, you stay hooked because you got flooded with that in the beginning because of the neglect, because they treated you so well, we're wired to stay in connection and we'll stay in relationships longer because at the beginning might've been so hopeful or more of an escape or a safety from your own inner trauma.

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38:59Shopify takes care of all of that and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with new Tonic on Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a$1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. Okay. Does that mean that safe and calm love feels boring at first? I think that for me, and I'm not going to speak so much on love, but I feel like sometimes safety for me felt very vulnerable at first.

39:43Like I think it can feel like, holy shit, this is real. We're not in intensity. We're so much in reality. And that's scary because it's not an escape and it's not serving that need to escape my life. As I've done my own work and I've let more what I call anchors in and my nervous system has gotten so used to people being more present with me, I'm like, this is love. This emotional presence needs to register as love. So now I can attract more of that because my nervous system has experienced more of it in my life. But I had to experience enough of it for me to even recognize it. Does that make sense?

40:27Yeah, it does. I'm interested in why safety felt vulnerable to you um yeah dig into that for me yeah i mean i think brene brown's work really speaks on this but in order to heal we need to become vulnerable in order to be vulnerable we need to feel safe and if i was living my life in a lot of chaos and intensity and workaholism and someone showed up and what slowed me down and was really present with me, I had a lot of protectors show up. I'm like, this is uncomfortable. I have to be here and just see more of me, show more of me, be more vulnerable. So I think a lot of people struggle if they haven't received a lot of that.

41:17When true safety shows up, it can feel very foreign. I suppose the ruthless thing in that situation as well is this person showed up and they're prepared to wade through the obvious amber flags that are pouring out of this person that's across from them. It's like, huh, that was a strange way to react to me doing something nice. So that was a strange way to respond to me saying that we should just spend this afternoon relaxing and talking to each other or whatever it might be. And if, I suppose, not everybody is going to have the tolerance to be able to do that. Not all partners that show up for you as the unhealed, unwhole person that's got a ton of protectors and coping mechanisms.

42:02So you found someone and hooray, isn't that great? Problem is there is kind of a little bit of a ticking clock because there is only, if that person is securely attached, there is only so long that they are going to put up with showing up for you in a way that you are unable to show up for yourself, show up in relation to what they're doing, and then reciprocally show up for them before they go, I just don't think, I don't think we're in the same place. I don't think we're compatible. I don't think that we're aiming in the same direction here. I don't think that this can go on. So there is, there is a, uh, you have an obligation.

42:43If you want to have a really good relationship, you have an obligation to see when people show up for you in a manner that, not that you don't deserve, but that you're almost like not ready for. It's like, oh my God, there's a lot going on here. And you say, okay, is this the sort of relationship that you want? Yes, okay, get to fucking work. Because if you don't, this person is going to go and be that amazing anchor for somebody else. And that means that, yeah, you do need to face your coping mechanisms. And you do need to learn to let go of those things, probably sooner rather than later, ideally.

43:15Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm a maglotherapist. I'm a couples counselor. And I love it when people do the work together. But if this feels like you, you don't need to start off with a romantic relationship. You can get really intimate with anchors, professionals, let your nervous system start to take in what true safety feels like, what healing feels like, so that you can do the work and you can be that anchor for somebody else. If this is really going on for you, you might have a little more individual work to do before you can really provide that for another. Okay, you mentioned anchors. We haven't talked space holding and ventral states.

43:55what what this separate out separate out all of this for me yeah so i mean you're probably so familiar with the nervous system i'm sure you do lots of talks on this but um a big part of the book is based on stephen porges's work that our social engagement system the way we've evolved is to be in social connection and in safety and we call this the ventral state so like you and i are pretty much in ventral. I mean, it mixes. I'm a little nervous now, so I'm sure it goes in and out of ventral. But so when we are both in a ventral state, we are in a state of safety, and that's when we can be more intimate.

44:35And like I said, we shift all the time. We're shifting in nanoseconds, actually. But in order to heal deep attachment wounds, and I guess this is an important theme like out there is that we do need sometimes adult anchoring in the ventral state of safety to hold space for our embodied experience so we can't move trauma alone we actually need co-regulation and adult anchoring to be with what's in the body with us so we can start to move the earlier wounds. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah.

45:16With the ventral state thing, what's a good indication that you're in it and what's a good indication that you're not in it? Yeah. So eye contact, your breath, feeling calm, feeling expansive, your thoughts being expansive. Sometimes I can tell my thoughts are not in a ventral state when I get protective or, you know, in a survival state. So your thoughts, your breathing, the way you're connecting, feeling free, feeling open, feeling safe. I have more awe in the world. Like I'm looking out my window, like the world is more beautiful when I'm in an eventual state. Like things are more magical. Music feels even more heightened.

45:53I just feel more connected to myself and others. Okay. Talking about the other side of it now then, you mentioned space holding. There has to be an adult in the room. figurative or literal. What does good space holding look like? Let's say that you're somebody who's listening, who has a relationship with someone, and you think, I want to become better at sitting with them. What is good space holding? Yeah, I mean, from the basic, anchoring is someone who doesn't try to fix you, change you. I mean, truly learning how to listen to people is good space holding. But if we were in like a therapeutic relationship or you were my anchor, Chris, and I was experiencing pain or dysregulation, your nervous system being in the ventral holds my experience and allows my nervous system to move, but eventually helps my nervous system get back into ventral.

46:52So good space holding is ability to hold safety for the other person. and your nervous system is literally helping to regulate. And that's what we call co-regulation. So that is true space holding. Is that why anxious and avoidant people find each other so magnetic? That there is something in the push and pull, which is almost the antithesis of that. There isn't one anchor. There are two boats getting ragged around by the sea at the same time. There's so many reasons why anxious and avoidant are attracted. I mean, the anxious is very lively and full of life and feels expressive. The avoidant feels stoic and grounded and independent and in control.

47:38So they're really attracted to these like lost parts of themselves. The problem with anxious and avoidant is that when an anxious person gets scared, the illusion of safety is I'm going to run towards my partner. I need to connect or else I'm going to feel my abandonment wound. and when an avoidant person gets scared, they need space and they need to run away to regulate their nervous system. So when they're both activated and they move out of ventral and they move into protective states, they both actually need the opposite of what the other can provide. So one needs connection right away and it's out of fear and one needs space right away, it out of fear.

48:20And so they get stuck in these cycles, which are quite miserable, particularly because their nervous system can't get back into connection and an eventual state fast enough that's ruthless i've been stuck in i mean and i'm sure many listeners have been stuck in that pattern it is it's an important one to get conscious of so that you don't spend the rest of your life in it because it does cause havoc on your nervous system and somatically um inflammation can happen if you're constantly in these activated states. How can someone help an anxiously attached partner to feel less anxious? What would you say?

48:58You have a partner that is regularly getting into, or even every so often, intermittently getting into these anxious states. What is a good way to bring them back into ventral? Actually, more reassurance. For the most part, more reassurance calms them down. So if I'm dating someone and I'm anxious and they can show up for me in a secure way, over time, my system will internalize that. But if they're avoidant and they get anxious when I get anxious, then we start the whole dance again. So the more we can feel secure and reassured. If you're really, really, really anxious, you might need to do some healing first around your abandonment wound so that you're not constantly projecting this fear into the relationship because your partner might feel like, oh my God, nothing's happening and I'm constantly reassuring and this terror just keeps living inside that person.

49:49What does healing attachment wounds really look like? I mean, it's like more like what does it really feel like? It feels like holding states and places within yourself that maybe you have not met before and letting other people witness you regress. It means like getting in touch with the things you might've been avoiding. It means being vulnerable. I mean, it was probably most humbling experience that I've gone through. I definitely think it's humbling to allow yourself to feel or re-experience what you originally went through. And it's also a gift because you're becoming more embodied and you're actually, you're becoming conscious of your original experience.

50:38Like I became conscious of what it's like to feel like in my crib. Like I regress, like I know what it's like to be a baby now, you know? And it was hard, but also I guess enlightening or just awakening and, and helps me feel more alive in the world. And I feel more free and I have more internal space. I could go on and on about what comes from doing this type of work. how come we can only heal in relationship yeah i mean so what was wounded in relationship must be healed in relationship and this is like neuroscience and so when let's say the abandonment wound we could go to a lot of different rooms if you were abandoned emotionally when you were little in order to heal a wound, at least in this philosophy, is you need to meet the wound and the wound needs to receive what it didn't get at the time it was created.

51:37So I need to be witnessed. I need to acknowledge what I didn't get. And then I need to also be received by somebody else. I need to not feel alone in the memory of the experience as I'm re-experiencing. I was ashamed. I need to be in touch with that. I need unconditional acceptance. I need someone to accept these parts of me. So I need to re-experience the experience. We call it, we need to have a disconfirming experience. So we need to have the experience and then revisit it and actually have it met very differently. This episode is brought to you by Incogni. If you've ever typed your name into Google and found your info on some weird website that you've never heard of, that's not a fluke.

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52:46Use it for 29 days. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 60 % discount on an annual plan by going to the link in the description below or heading to incogni.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. That's so good. I've kind of got it in my head about the, again, the ruthlessness that people need. If we have childhood wounds and we need to heal them in relationship with somebody else. That means that we need to find somebody who is able to do the work to accumulate the capacity or already has the capacity to be able to sit with us so that we can go through this.

53:32And I'm thinking, you know, we talked earlier on about one of the challenges that women have, which is where you've got to let go of this only, like, you know, civilizationally, relatively recently acquired independence, socioeconomically in order to tap into getting below the neck to not being hard charging, all the rest of it. But I think this is one in particular that guys will have an issue with, which is in order to heal in relationship, we need to be vulnerable. We need to be prepared to revisit something from our past, which is shameful or difficult or challenging or makes us feel insufficient or scared.

54:07And we need to do that in relationship. Doing that with another guy friend is going to be really tough. There are all of the concerns about your friend seeing you as weak, about you no longer being an ally or a compatriot that is competent. And you go, okay, well, I'll turn to my intimate relationship. Okay, well, brilliant. You need to find a woman who is able to sit with you going back into the most painful, shameful, vulnerable part of your life and be comfortable enough to come out the other side of it. Guys already have enough fear around emasculating themselves. Don't ever show your emotions to your partner.

54:47She's just going to leave you as soon as that is. I think almost every definition of masculinity that I've come across has some version of emotional mastery or emotional control in there as one of the definitions of masculinity. So you're saying that I need to literally let go of perhaps the keystone of my masculinity in order to be able to heal this thing. But if I go through that, perhaps my partner is going to leave me. So it does not surprise me that most guys go, ah, way safer, way easier for me to just swallow this and never actually tap into that. It doesn't seem particularly well rewarded or incentivized.

55:24Yeah. I mean, I'm smiling, but you like hit one of the most actually painful like truths out there is that it's actually a lot harder for men to heal because being vulnerable as a man was not even supported and it feels very dangerous for most men. I mean, it was hard for me as a woman to be vulnerable. So you're hitting on a point and I'm smiling because I'm like, this is not going to sell my book, right? Like who wants to walk into this kind of work? But it like the research shows that if you do and you are courageous enough to get vulnerable, like your life changes, like things change inside.

56:04You have more freedom. You, I can't even put it into words what it's like to go through the work. And yet it is probably the scariest thing most people will do. And that's why you start slow. And it's not about like you get anchors and you start slow and you find safe people. And it's not like, but it is like you're hitting the nail on the head, Chris, like it's really hard for men, a lot of men and in the UK too. I mean, I have one UK client and, you know, feelings are not supposed to be talked about and this is intergenerational and this is cultural. And the truth is, I think that true masculinity comes from this portal of being vulnerable and going there.

56:47And it's what women, a lot of women say they want, right? And it's, it's what we have to go through to get to the other side of this. So you're hitting a very valid point. And it's a very sad point, to be honest. Yeah, especially in a world that tells men, your primary problem is that you're too masculine. Like if you were just more like women, a lot of your problems would go if you just talked about your emotions more. It's like, I think, somewhere in the 90s percent of middle aged men who take their own life had already sought help through some kind of therapy or had reached out to some sort of group or organization, you're okay.

57:21It's evident that just talk about it, bro, isn't working. And also all of the incentives align for guys to find that hard. So yeah, I think, you know, sympathy for the challenges that women face, but sympathy for the challenges that men face there as well. I'm interested in sort of getting practical and looking at some of the practices that couples could do together to help regulate maybe, well, I don't know, you tell me, like maybe they're about to have a difficult conversation or they want to do some emotional work. How should that be done? Or maybe they've been apart for a little while and they're coming back together and they want to have this sense of safety and deepen connection.

57:59Or maybe they've just had an argument. Like what are the big buckets of practices that you think are powerful for couples to do together? Well, I mean, I'm an Imago therapist. I would say if you're struggling, find an Imago therapist or an EFT therapist. But I think understanding your nervous system and the basics around when I'm scared, this is how my nervous system responds. And do I shut down? Do I get activated? Do I fight? Do I flee? Do I collapse? Do I people please? And what do I really need in those moments? And when you shut down, you can tell your partner or when you're upset, how does your body respond?

58:37And instead of getting caught in the behaviors that we might be doing, can we start having conversations around our nervous system? Hey, I'm not in a state of safety right now. I'm feeling very protective and I want to get critical or, you know, this is where I'm at or what I need right now because I'm not feeling safe. And how can we get back into connection and safety faster by having more conversations about where our nervous system's at rather than repeating the behaviors over and over again? okay so that's the conversation are there any other practices that you think are good for couples to co-regulate together or is that not an area that you like to get into no no i mean co-regulation is great i think that you know what happens most of the time is one couple gets activated like when we're in intimate relationship we're telepathing we're having a telepathing conversation.

59:31Your nervous system and my nervous system are speaking to each other every nanosecond. Am I safe? Are you with me? So what happens a lot of the time where couples get stuck is one person gets activated and unconsciously and automatically the other person gets activated at the same time. You can't even help that because we're so connected. So I think just slowing down and starting to understand, like, I have couples who get upset because their partner comes home activated and then they get activated. I'm like, you can't help being activated and you can't help getting activated back. So slowing down and starting to understand that and then figuring out what does regulate me?

1:00:10What do I need when I'm activated? Get out of the story. Stop putting gasoline on the fire. How can I get back into a state of safety? What makes me feel connected to my partner? And can they give that to me? Can I ask for it, right? It's really hard for a lot of men and women, but to even ask for what is it that I need when I am dysregulated? so i need space can you give your partner space what i guess the challenge there is if you can only do it with somebody else this kind of flies in the face of a lot of self-development personal development stuff which is you can lone ranger monk mode sigma wolf your way through like whatever the problems are in your life you're saying hey if you've got some wounds and some patterns from childhood that keep showing up and kind of controlling you in later life this is something this is a weight that you need a second person to help you lift as well yeah and it's like as a self-help author i like i think this is such an important and as someone who does want people to read my book like the truth is I would be doing the science and injustice if I said read this book and fix yourself because that's just not how developmental trauma heals and I have spent too much of my life with every freaking self-help book that I could get my hands on trying to help myself not realizing that a lot of what I needed to heal inside I needed the right support to heal I needed safe people, safe environments.

1:01:47And now I understand the neuroscience behind it. So I don't want to put that message out. Read this book in three steps, you're going to be healed. That's just not how it works. But I provide such a rich understanding of how it works that I hope you walk away feeling really grounded in the science around healing. So it's not woo-woo. So you do feel like, oh my God, there is a lot of science backing up why we can't heal a lot of things alone. What's the role? I'm interested in the role of rupture and repair here. So yeah, I mean, that goes deep. So when we're an infant and we're crying and we're fussing and we're reaching out in sympathetic activation, our parent is usually trying to figure out what, what do we want?

1:02:33Do we want, are they hungry? Are they thirsty? Are they hot? Right? There's a rupture and then the parent takes some time, some time and a repair. So rupture and repair is when we get dysregulated and the other person kind of works on figuring out what's wrong and we get back into connection and calmness together. Actually, rupture and repair happens a lot when we're infants and how well our parents rupture and repair indicate how well we handle conflict and we rupture and repair as adults. So a lot of people think, oh, I hate the word codependency, but like a lot of people think, oh, if we're fighting, this is bad or conflict is bad.

1:03:12It's like, no, actually true rupture and repair, like real rupture and repair, really understanding what your partner is going through, really getting to what's going on inside their body, really seeing their perspective and they're seeing your perspective. When we have conflict, it's an opportunity not only to repair on a deep level, but to build deeper intimacy. And so rupture, even though it dysregulates us, it's uncomfortable. It's a very important part of close relationships, rupture and repair. What about when it comes, you work with a lot of couples. What do couples get wrong and get right when it comes to rupture and repair within a relationship?

1:03:51I think that most people, they don't like rupture because it feels uncomfortable. and they don't know how to use it as an opportunity for deeper understanding and more intimacy. So they get frustrated right away that they're uncomfortable and they're dysregulated. But I think once they learn the tools and they can step back and really understand and have more dialogue around what's going on inside, your side and my side, and it's never about who's right. It's always about, can I understand your world better and get back into connection? then rupture and repair becomes easier. It's like people-pleasing.

1:04:28It's like if I am such a people-pleaser and I can't handle conflict, then I'm not going to tell you, Chris, if something's really bothering me. I'm going to hold it in. I learned that conflict isn't okay. I didn't learn healthy rupture and repair. But if I have a healthy friendship, and let's say you're my friend, and I can come to you and I can say, you know what? What you said to me really hurt me. And you don't have all this shame getting kicked up on you. And you can say, you know, Jess, I didn't realize that. Tell me what was going on inside of you. And you can join my world instead of reacting and getting defensive.

1:05:03You have an opportunity to get so much closer to me. And I have an opportunity to work through what's upsetting me versus people pleasing and fawning and just kind of keeping it all in. That's like the best example I can get on like a micro. It really is important to have people that are emotionally fluent around you, because I can imagine how in a friendship like that, you have a pattern of compromising boundaries, people pleasing in order to not upset somebody else because you learned as a kid that other people's emotions need to be managed by you. and your friend, maybe the one time that you pluck up the courage to do that, does break down and does cry a load.

1:05:47And you think, well, this just, I knew that this was how the world was going to show up for me. This is exactly what I predicted was going to happen. And your friend's inability to tolerate a fair piece of feedback has reinforced and worsened this pattern that you're trying to get over. so yeah surrounding yourself with with people who are um a little bit at least as regulated as you or at least trying to do the work to get close to that seems to be really important i i was thinking about as well there must be a unique challenge to healing from wounds that are created inside of the relationship that you're trying to heal them in.

1:06:33Like that's, that's got to be a real difficulty. Yeah. I mean, like you're kind of saying two different things, but absolutely. And I would, the one thing that blocks people from true repair is shame. So like, if I told you, Hey, Chris, that really upset me. And like, you had so much shame and you can't, you can't, you got defensive. It means that you didn't have the capacity. But here's what I'll say. If you can experience true rupture and repair with one friend and say, hey, I want to come to you with this and really experience it once in your system, you can keep recreating it. And you can know who has the capacity and who doesn't, right?

1:07:10And so if we keep going back to people who don't have the capacity, we're just confirming that we can't rupture, that we can't reach out, that we can't share what's bothering us. But if we orient towards a person who does have the capacity and And we're like, oh my God, I was able to share and I had a disconfirming experience. We only need one or two of them to be like, oh my God, rupture might not be as scary as we think. I love the idea of disconfirming experiences. It's really cool. It sounds like the sort of thing you don't want, but I guess in this world, it's actually something that you're looking for.

1:07:43Yeah, especially when you want to change a belief system or a pattern inside. We want to show your nervous system, actually, you're not going to get left this time or this person is going to show up differently. But you do need to go to people who have the emotional capacity. What about when people should stay or when they should leave? I have a whole chapter on that.

1:08:06Sometimes the wounding is so early. I go into narcissism and I go into borderline personality. And I really describe them as complex infant trauma. and sometimes you can be with someone and your trauma overlaps so much that either you're so focused on saving them, you're so invested in their trauma or you're regressed so much that you can't get out of the dynamic. Sometimes the wounding when it's so early, people need to heal a little bit more individually before they can have a healthy relationship. And it's important to understand where the trauma bond or the trauma cycle keeps repeating itself and to get conscious.

1:08:48Like I got conscious in my last relationship because I didn't make it about his drug use. I was able to go back to like how this really impacted me when I was tiny. So it's important for people who are repeating patterns and are stuck and are miserable to get conscious of the original wound that is actually being recreated so they can get out of the here and now and dive deeper and then break the paradigm. It's interesting that you said about sort of very early wounds, sort of very extreme ones. I think about that in relationships as well. Like the idea of very early rupture without repair, creating a signature that sort of defines all other interactions that occur from there.

1:09:35Like the early months of a relationship are pretty formative and they kind of set the tone for a lot of things that are moving forward. Like for instance, if you were to have a series of big blowups three years into a relationship that had been relatively stable until then, the difference between that and what it says for the next three years after that compared with this was how the relationship started and now you've got to kind of undo all of these coping mechanisms. So yeah, I have to assume that there is such a thing as too much rupture to repair inside of a relationship as well. Yeah, I mean, and you're kind of describing a couple things, but if you rupture a lot and you don't have the tools to deeply repair, then you kind of just repeat the same thing without getting to the core of it.

1:10:20But most healthy rupture and repair usually actually gets you closer. So that's just a sign that you're not really repairing. You're just coming back together into connection, but you're not really resolving or getting to the root of of the issue. I know, like, also, I don't know if this is relevant, but I had a friend once and we never fought. And I even tell people who are dating, like fighting is good. And two years into our relationship, something happened and we had a fight and she never talked to me again. And I was like, okay, we ruptured and we couldn't repair. And I think that happens a lot.

1:10:56Like you don't know how someone is going to really like how to work through it with someone until you've had a rupture and repair. When you're dating someone, you need to have a little conflict. You need to see if they can validate you. You need to see if you guys can see each other's side of you. You need to use your voice. You need to have these ruptures and repairs because it really tells you a lot about how you can evolve together or not. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I've had the friendships and relationships in the past that have been like that too. and you're right, never testing the water with that does result in you like a pretty catastrophic blow up happening.

1:11:38That being said, there is such a thing as too frequent and too large rupture. And obviously, if you're testing the waters regularly, oh, this is great. You know, it's building our resilience. Look at how much we're getting used to being in conflict with each other. Like, yeah, but only if you can actually come back together, hold each other, look each other in the eyes and say, I'm still here. This is, you know, we're now stronger. You're right. It should actually be called rupture and build up as opposed to rupture and repair because repair looks like you go zero, minus one, zero again. But the goal is to go zero, minus one, plus one.

1:12:13And each time that you rupture, you end up in a stronger place than you were previously, more deeply connected, more aware. Yeah. I mean, yes, repair on a real level gets you deeper. It brings you deeper into intimacy. And this might be a really bad example, but let's say you've been cheated on. That might be a behavior that you walk away in a rupture and never want to repair. No judgment here. And you could do the deep work with that person, get to the root of it, and you might actually evolve past that and understand what was really going on and have a closer relationship than ever. And that's probably not the best example because people are going to be like, if someone cheats on you, just leave them.

1:12:50But I'm saying really bad things can happen. and if you work through them together, you actually can evolve to a much deeper level together. But it requires a lot of work. Where does somebody start? Beyond buying the book Safe by Jessica Baum, where does somebody start practically with moving through this? Well, I actually provide your audience with the Wheel of Attachment, which is new to this book and new to the attachment space, but starting to understand what your earliest relationship dynamics were like, how you felt in your earliest relationship dynamics, starting to get a sense of those things because those are what we're repeating later on.

1:13:34So I think that's where we start. Of course, I'm a psychotherapist, and that's what I'm going to say. But our earliest relationships, how we felt safe in our home, who we felt safe with, who we didn't feel safe with, what did our bodies feel around these people, what kind of dynamics did we have with our siblings, siblings, getting in touch with all of those things. And who in my life now does that feel similar with? How am I repeating these patterns? What core wounds are continuing to show up in my life? And how much charge do these wounds have? Do I feel them in my body? Where do they live? And how big are they?

1:14:09Heck yeah. Jessica Baum, ladies and gentlemen. Jessica, I appreciate the heck out of you. Two slamming books in a row that I think are very timely. Where should people go to keep up to with everything you're doing well you're supposed to get a link with like free gifts for your audience specifically so i'll have to make sure they get that but it's a guide to the wheel and then um a video of me and my mentor who's 82 who has provided me so much safety talking about insecurity to security um i'm on social media um but you can just put jessica down i feel bad for anybody else named my name because if you just put my name into google it just like i show up everywhere.

1:14:48So the number one, Jessica Bum, I have a highly anti-Semitic British MP, um, who also shares my name. And I sometimes, I sometimes wonder if he, he sees me trending online and gets pissed off because I'm speaking to like Ben Shapiro or someone Jewish. And, uh, and I, every so often I log on and find out that he's got into conflict with Israel. So, uh, I may be, I may be, um, assassinated at some point because somebody has gotten the wrong Chris Williamson killed but we'll wait and see everybody knows you though and yeah you're just out there doing your thing and I think it's just so awesome to see and I'm excited for you well I appreciate you very much it's been a long time since your first one and uh I'm so glad to see that you're continuing to flourish thank you this is an Etsy holiday ad but you won't hear any sleigh bells or classic carols instead you'll hear something original the sound of an Etsy holiday which Sounds like this.

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