Attachment Isn’t Solo Work: Healing Through Community with Martin Jonsson (310)

0:00The whole idea of the adult attachment injury, for instance, is to surprise the unconscious. That's like the essence of it to some extent. And as we know, of course, that that's a measure of reflective functioning, which has turned into the mentalization based treatments. So what we have done or done our best to do is to take all of these dynamic ideas, the metapsychologies, the psychodynamic metapsychology of it, and to bring this into also a practice based. community. Even though it doesn't come necessarily from the tradition of DBT or cognitive work, I think it relies more on attachment theory and the psychodynamic models, but still putting it into a skills model.

0:45Welcome to Therapist Uncensored. Building on decades of professional experience, this podcast tackles neurobiology, modern attachment, and more in an honest way that's helpful and healing humans. Your session begins now with Dr. Ann Kelly and Sue Marriott.

1:06Hey, you guys. While we know relationships are wonderful, they are also really hard. Many of us believe that they shouldn't be, that if we have good connection and good communication, things will just go smoothly. But it's really that belief that can make us feel stubborn and even more hopeless. So relationships take work. It does for Sue and I. We can make it look easy. It's not. And one of the ways is because many of us, we differ. We differ in what activates us, what makes us feel threat, the expectation. And it's these differences that are held in our body, not our thoughts. And they influence how we talk, how we love, how we fight.

1:43So holding that belief, if he or she or they could just understand me, if they love me, they do something different, is not really true. And we're talking about relationships with your partner, your teenager, your mother-in-law. So Sue and I've created an online course that can help you understand yourself and those you love in a different way. This is not just for therapists, it's for everyone. Although the good news is if you're a therapist, you can get CEs along the way, and all of you can use the visuals and the worksheets individually, or you could even use them in your own private practice.

2:17So while the course is based on our book, Secure Relating, Holding Your Own in an Insecure World, it is definitely not a replication of the book. We talk directly to you. You learn how to understand more deeply your attachment, those you love, the neuroscience behind it, and how to build secure types of connections right now in your everyday relationships. rather than changing one another, y 'all can shift together in very important ways. It's very powerful. We're getting great reviews. Check it out. It's at therapistuncensored.com slash BAS, therapistuncensored.com slash BAS. The BAS stands for beyond attachment styles, the science of growing secure adult relationships.

3:05And by the way, the cost of the course is about the amount of one individual therapy session, and yet you get hours and hours and hours of what we think is extremely valuable information. So check it out. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Therapist Uncensored. Sue Marriott here, and I have a guest that is going to help us really go from the theory of attachment, the science of it, the science of neurobiology, and turn this into something more practical and usable for everybody listening and, you know, make it where the rubber hits the road, if you will. I'm with Martin Johnson, a Swedish clinical psychologist and founder of the SecureBase Lab, a Stockholm-based community and training model for attachment and repair.

3:53Welcome to the show, Martin. Thanks, Sue. Happy to be here. Can you describe yourself a little bit for our audience so that they can get a feel for you? I gave this some thought and what I think I want to sort of share first is that I've always had this passion for really integrating the wisdom and science about human connection. So I grew up in a household with a mother who's a deacon and a nurse and a father who struggled quite a bit with mental health issues. So I came out of that, of course, enriched by a lot of their perspectives on life, but also pretty confused in a way. Having lived with a father with quite a lot of mental health issues and a mother who was both a caretaker and a person of faith.

4:43So that's sort of how I started out. My original idea was to either train as a psychologist or a priest or a filmmaker. When I was in college, that's where I was aiming for. And I didn't train as a psychologist at first, and I didn't train as a priest either, due to some natural consequences of not sharing that faith, particularly at that time. So I went for the filmmaker. I did that for a while, but quickly shifted into working as a somatic therapist. So I used to work as a body worker for quite a lot of years. Where are you right now in the world? Right now I'm sitting in Sweden. I'm at the west coast of Sweden.

5:23So long story short, today I work as a clinical psychologist in my private practice. And I also have created the Secure Base Lab, as you just mentioned. So I live here on the countryside in the woods with my family, my partner and two kids. You know, you mentioned spirituality and religion. Is that something that you've incorporated into your practice at this time or into your own personal practice? Yeah, you could say that, I think for natural reasons, because we could say that we have a lot of openness and spiritually friendly community, like really embracing diversity in all its forms. I would say that the people who show up have a deep interest in existential or spiritual ways of living.

6:12But for you personally, I was just thinking about your history with your mom as a deacon and then thinking about being a priest. Yeah, so I started out having that as a very personal path. I thought I was going to be a clergy of sorts or a monk or something like this. So for a long time, I was really, really engaged in a lot of spiritual practice. So you could say that I started out more on the wisdom side rather than the science side of things. Yes. But that led me also to realize, which I guess you've also come across, that there's also this thing of spiritual bypassing, of not really wanting to look at the deeper, perhaps more difficult issues in life.

6:54So that was also a turning point for me to really get grounded with psychology and science. I'm interested partly because I notice that especially with sort of world events and things like that, that it can be tricky as a therapist to incorporate spirituality. And a lot of folks, they just hear the term and they have these associations of power over. So I have been curious lately, just as I meet and talk to people about, is this a part of us that we've had to cut off? It's kind of like in our country, our flag has been taken to mean something different than what, if we're representing only part of us.

7:40And so I kind of think about that with this idea of spirituality, of how do we, we don't want to go against it. Like I'm thinking of a teenager. It's like, my parent wants me to do a thing, so I'm going to not do the thing. But then to do, you know, it just feels like a delicate balancing practice. That's why I was curious, since you had such interest in it, if you had been able to hold on to it as a thread in your practice or needed to just kind of disavow it and get away from it. For me personally, it's been kind of a path of shedding layers, going more for lack of better work, more for the core or not the esoteric or the mystical necessarily, but really the most human expression of what sits at the core of all religions, basically, which comes down to, yeah, you could call it love.

8:33That would be the most naive and down-to-earth thing I could say about it. And I think that's also the way I sort of left sort of spirituality and religion as not leaving it necessarily, but not as my main focus and taking me sort of like, or yeah, sort of taking me further into human connection, which eventually led me into attachment work. Well, I love that. And then now you're doing a lot of work in groups. Yeah, I don't mean to overkill the spiritual piece, but part of what can be missing is community. That like when we disown a spiritual part or a religion because of harm, that a lot of folks are left bereft without community.

9:20You particularly are interested in therapy via community and groups. So how did you land there and kind of what are you seeing from your perspective? from my experience, having had this first as a very personal interest and then as a, I wouldn't say it as a hobby, but like really deep personal interest, then that turning more into a professional part of my life. I think I would have to say that I've been a part or at least included in some way, like 50 plus communities of different sorts. And what I've come to see is that No matter if you join the community or the group based on your interest in motorcycles or God or scrapbooking, it's really this deep sense of community.

10:10You're really looking for that belonging, which is, of course, was so highlighted after the pandemic and the meaning crisis. When I look back at it, what I came to see is that really this deep need for belonging also relates so much to the attachment repair process. so i felt that that was such a natural thing to to draw the best parts of community belonging and the therapeutic process of attachment work so that's basically how my work came together right that's really interesting and so what's the difference between a group or a task group or you know all the people i see at yoga or whatever like at what point from your perspective does it actually flip into what we would call community?

10:54I've been pondering this question a lot, like the last 10, 15 years. And I think my answer has changed along the way. And if you ask me in five years, I've probably changed my mind again. But of course, the overall sense would be that when you have this really shared endeavor, something that you are relating to, not just from a cognitive mental space or something that is of your interest. Let's say you're interested in film or literature or whatever. Of course, that's like something that stimulates you. But I think when it comes to the level of really something that you need and that you deeply care for, I think that's a way to describe community outside of just the regular sense of community, which are more connected to neighbors and the people you happen to live next to, right?

11:47so I think intentionality has a really big part of it and I think in my experience the ability to contribute is a really essential part of it which then I think takes us also into this topic of the yeah expert culture that we live in where very often we're consumers and someone is the expert in a particular topic so I think community also has to do with the ability to collaborate and to contribute to each other. That's an essential part of it. I love highlighting the idea of contributing. That rings really true for me. Like if I think of a neighborhood, you could live next to one another and never speak and never know one another.

12:30So are you part of a community versus something happens to the building or something happens to the street and everybody comes out and starts working together. It's like, ah, there's the visible thread that brings us together for this shared purpose of dealing with the ice storm or whatever it is, and the community comes together. But I really dig the idea of the contribution as part of it. Yeah, I remember trying to make sense of why were people gathering in a church, for instance. I remember being like seven, eight-year-old, sitting in the bench, listening to the sermon, and really trying to figure out why are people gathering for this.

13:11Of course, later on, I have a much more sophisticated understanding of that, but at the beginning, I really remember why are people gathering, what are they gathering for, and I think my conclusion as a child was that they're here to be together in a very deep fashion, and that's what I saw as a kid. Then, of course, after having studied religion, spirituality in different ways, I, of course, know that it has so much more meaning to people and so much more worth. But just to take it like one sort of step further, I think for me personally, like when I was growing up, I joined 12-step movement as a child of someone dealing with alcoholism.

13:54I guess, you know, there are different 12-step groups for that. And that was sort of like the next layer of me seeing what peer support really does to people. So I think that also builds on what you share there. And I think it has a lot of, even though I necessarily see both pros and cons with the 12-step movement, I really see this contributing peer support model also being a crucial part of Mesa community. And to your point, one of the ways that the 12-step model works is not that you're showing up and being fed, but that you give your time and energy and you share your experience for other people.

14:32And there's something about flipping that, where you're showing up to help or to be of service as a real healing. You know, I think about the research with altruism and how good that is for our bodies and, you know, picking up trash. It doesn't matter what it is, but doing something good for other people. There's something just that by itself that is healing for us. And connecting, like you said, it brings us together. Yeah, for sure. And I think what sets my view or the view that I'm trying to share here of community is that it's more like a horizontal empathy. empathy moves sideways rather than in a hierarchical manner i think this is also tying with for instance the 12-step program to both witness each other and hear what's going on someone and then also be able to support or to to offer witnessing so it's it's both these two things that i see really crucial i love it horizontal versus vertical so when that ties into attachment work, that to me has been super exciting and interesting and really valuable.

15:45So say more about the tie-in to attachment. Like for instance, if we take the 12-step movement or all the recovery models out there, you could say that what's surfacing, I think, for a lot of the research is that attachment needs to be part of the treatment program or it needs to be part of the treatment process of recovery, for instance. So I think that was my realization and a lot of people's realization that even though we're working with recovery, for instance, from addictions of sorts, there also is this really key component of relationship for sort of further to go beyond sobriety into flourishing.

16:22So I think that's one of the ways that it ties into attachment work from 12-step work, for instance. So then the communities that you lead and run, just why don't you paint us a picture? What does that look like? It's an online, it's like an attachment informed online community. And this came together after 10, 12 years of experimenting with different group formats and work in small groups. It's basically people who have become self-aware that there's something related to attachment. There's something related to attachment insecurity that is a missing piece of my healing journey. So the people who show up normally have like 10, 15 years of prior inner work with therapy or self-studies or reading.

17:12And then they realize that there's something around attachment. So what we've created is an online community space where people can show up and be part of an ecosystem where we have weekly meetings. We have what we call care groups, which are basically triads, like peer support groups, and reoccurring different modalities for working with attachment, basically. So it's an ambitious project, and we're a collective of psychologists and therapists and also inviting researchers to pull together the strings to create a really in-depth ecosystem of attachment work. So, you know, one of my interests in this in particular is that besides that I'm a huge group person and been leading groups for a long time and love them and think they heal in ways that we cannot heal in individual therapy.

18:07But I imagine, yeah, there's a lot of folks that even have been working individually and are aware of and aware that they have attachment stuff and are doing everything that they know how to do with their individual therapist. But this takes it to another level. And, you know, we've been particularly interested in sort of non-West, not non-Western, but like expanding our application of these ideas beyond just the standard stamp of everything that we have learned so far, which really brings people indoors. It's very individual-based. It can be very pathologically based. What's wrong with you? Are you depressed?

18:45It ignores systems that create insecurity. and it ignores some of the group components. So this is, I think, a concrete example of moving this work back into a peer model and a community-based model. So can you give us more detail? Like, what does it look like? What kind of things do you guys do? Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I also really want to, I think, what got us both started in a way is to come back to some of the original work of John Bowlby and his fellow researchers in the beginning. I think this is not like a very widespread idea about the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, the EEA model.

19:27But I think that's sort of like a little thread of Bowlby's work. And for those who knew him, they might need to correct me on this one. But still, it ties back to the very fact that originally the attachment process was not situated within a dyadic context. It was situated in a group context. That's great. It's good to call that out and to name him as part of that. And then you have Ainsworth and Mermaine and all these great researchers and all the people that you've had on the podcast, all these clinicians and researchers who's really trying to forward this. And just to state, I mean, I think both you and I, we work one-on-one still to a great extent.

20:11So I really think that that format is valuable. but I think what you're pointing to is both tying back to the original work but the people who show up with us they have already done individual therapy and they want to do it in a group format that's what I've found to be very interesting they have gained a lot from being in individual therapy but it's this gap you know the generalization gap what you learn what you're able to experience in therapy, the safety, the security, the secure base, whatever experience you've had with one particular person, sometimes it's difficult to transfer out into your everyday life.

20:49So I think an attempt as the one we're doing of creating a group format is really giving people a wider opportunity to have corrective emotional experiences from people that are not paid to provide corrective emotional experiences. Well, I want you to say more. It's a tricky thing, but it's a fabulous model to do more peer work. So how does that work? I mean, I have so many examples. Let's say someone joins the community. They show up like a typical person I can think of as someone who've done individual therapy for years. They're self-aware to a large extent, and they carry some core beliefs, and they're maybe even aware of their internal working models, if we are to use some of the attachment jargon.

21:38So they're aware to some extent of their internal working models. And as we move into the programs, the immersions, and the community experience, of course, we provide a ton of attachment psychology tailored to their specific situation. And then as we do the group work, for instance, someone shows up with this core belief that I'm too much or the shame that I carry if I share that with people, I will be abandoned. And maybe they already had that experience with a therapist that I'm not abandoned by my therapist. My therapist accepts me, loves me, cares for me. But still there's this little distrust that sort of sticks there because it's this, perhaps you could call it cynicism.

22:23Like this, yeah, you're paid to be loving and caring and all these things. So I think what I've seen quite a lot of times is that when you get this empathic support or when your shame is absorbed by the group, you have not only one data point, so to speak, you have five or six people who show up for you in the same attachment-informed context. And I think that's one of the things that really makes difference for people. And at the beginning, myself, I was curious to see how much this mattered. But this seems to matter the world to a lot of people. I'm totally on board with that. I think of the way I describe it is being in a group provides these nutrients, a lot of nutrients we don't even know we need.

23:10And the more that we're there, we absorb what we need. But what about the peer model part versus the professionally led part? So we have what we call the care groups, which is an acronym for connection, attachment, regulation, and empathy. So what that is, is it's basically a triad of members who show up, which is a self-led group, a peer-supported group. wait now when you say show up is this in person is this online they meet online yeah so they do their own scheduling and they and meet in triads where they do like simple very simple practices of sharing like their attachment triggers that they have recognized during the week some repair work that they have attempted to do in their relationships or just trying to state their attachment state like I'm pulling away or I'm trying to really grab on to my person or just having this peer supported group that knows the language of attachment this is something I have seen to be extremely valuable for people to not have like 10 different languages for what's going on like one central way of describing and I think in that way attachment theory has a really pinpointed way of describing relational phenomena.

24:37Totally. And I've seen that folks that are familiar with our work begin to pick up the language of the colors and the attachment regulation as blue and red and tie-dye and green, or you're in the green zone. So then when other people start using that same language, there really is a bonding around that.

25:06What I love about being a therapist, being with my clients, doing the work together. The thing I like the very least, the business side of running my practice, because I suck at it. For years, I paid someone to do my billing because I hated it so much. And when she moved on, oh my God, my billing suffered. True story. I would actually forget to bill for weeks, sometimes a month. Clients don't love that. Sue had been using Simple Practice for years and she kept trying to convince me to shift. I don't know why I was so stubborn because I never saw her have business stress. I finally did shift about five years ago and it has been a game changer.

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27:27so are these peer groups care groups they're an offshoot of another part of the program i imagine like there's a there's a different foundation that this is adding to yeah yes so you have like the main you could say like a community or like a town hall meeting imagine all these people who really want to do attachment work they show up once every week and we have a monthly theme like this month for instance of and where and right now is self-regulation which ties into co-regulation actually which is more of what we're doing so there's a monthly theme and then there's a weekly facilitated like a therapist facilitated session and that is sort of offshoots into personal work that you're doing with like a workbook or personalized material.

28:17And then you have the care group. And then the care group is also supported and facilitated by therapists. So whenever you run across something that you need support with, we're supporting people as they move along with their care group. But I also want to tie back to the Mars model in a way because we've been tying back to your books to a large extent because as you know, and going beyond attachment styles and going beyond this categorical way of talking about it, what I also hear from participants is that it's one thing to take an attachment quiz. It's another thing to get relational feedback from someone seeing you while you're, like your anxiety going down and having another live person giving you feedback.

29:04For instance, saying something like, I see you relating much less anxiously than you did six months ago. or you're avoiding your own needs way less than you did six months ago. To have this relational feedback, I think that's a way to perhaps move away a little bit from the diagnostical nature of attachment to patterns or attachment styles. You said you have multiple providers and things like that. How accessible is this community? Because when we think of community, so if somebody's listening, is this something that pretty much anybody can join? or is it fee-based or how does it work? What we have found to be the most secure and effective way is to have some common ground before you step into the community.

29:52So we have a five-week immersion to sort of really set the tone to share some of the basic attachment concepts to really get a felt security in the group. And that's, I would say, a fairly accessible price for like an immersion like that to join. And after you've done that, we of course, we screen, of course, for trauma and all these things. So it's a safe space for everyone to join. After that, you're invited into community. So usually the people who show up there are, I would say, very or extremely committed to attachment work. So it's also people who really want to do the work. And funnily enough, and to my great surprise and joy, is it's about 25 % are therapists and psychologists who join for their own sake.

30:40Well, because it's a unique offering and that makes sense. So you go through so that everybody's kind of on the same page. And one of the things, I saw you post something on sexuality and attachment. So can we just use that as an example of something that is taught as part of your program, but why sexuality and what are folks learning related to their attachment? Yeah. Why sexuality? That answer is pretty simple because most people avoid it. And I think therapists and psychologists are regularly accused of not themselves being comfortable with talking about sexuality or asking about sexual issues.

31:20So I think it took quite a while also for us to open up that topic. I'm a trained sexologist in Sweden, in the university here, so I had a passion for that. And I know, of course, that sits for a lot of people very much at the center of relating. So within the community, we have like five main areas which we work with. Of course, the one obvious is romantic relationships and parenting. and we work with spirituality and how attachment informs that process and also friendships, but then of course sexuality. And so we've gained quite a lot of interest in that topic because if we are to flirt at least a little bit with some of the patterns, the main avoidance and anxiety we have, the anxiety and avoidance, of course, will then also show up in sexuality.

32:11So I think there's a pretty solid research field to sort of exemplify and share that your attachment patterns, they don't stop outside of the bedroom, so to speak. They follow you into the bedroom. So if someone leans blue, as we call it, or when they are stressed can zip up or get a little bit more avoidant or dismissive, then how might that show up in the bedroom? The one that most people share most often is, of course, after sex. Basically, you want to get out of there. You want to gnaw your arm off and get out? Gnaw your arm off and slide out of there and take a shower, whatever, or get on with your evening or your day.

32:54So that would be one way of looking at it from a blue perspective or more of an avoidant perspective. But of course, there's so much. I think Philip Shaver and the associates, they have done such great research to share how attachment patterns shows up like this, for instance, in sexual intimate situations. And also I think sex means different things to different people, depending not only on only preference, but also on their attachment status, so to speak. So somebody blue-oriented, just to stick with that example for a minute, one of the issues is that when we are activated in that way, we are less in touch with our bodies and less in touch that we need anything.

33:38And so it makes sense then to translate that again into the bedroom and how that would impact pleasure and initiation and afterwards and things like that. Yeah, I mean, this probably calls for a whole different, like another conversation. But you could say that, of course, if emotional, deep emotional states and needs are some of the things that a person more in the blue area struggles with or more in a born state, of course, then expressing needs, expressing emotions, expressing sexual needs and expressing sexually related sensation. that of course would be a huge challenge to do live as it's all going on.

34:20And then if you take it from the more anxious or the more red perspective, then of course boundaries, knowing when to say no. And then we're in this whole area of consent, of course, which is so important and so difficult for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people have had experience of not really knowing when there is a no. and when the no comes from a place of anxiety will i lose the connection will i lose the love basically if i share my boundary so i think it matters a lot and it it's one of those areas where i think people intuitively know that your attachment patterns will travel pretty effectively into your sexual core but of course it's depending on culture and which country you're from all these things.

35:06I think the Nordics are known for being a bit more liberated, perhaps. I don't think it's the same these days. I think we're all basically on the same page nowadays. But if you look at the Catholic countries, I see some differences when people show up, for instance, from Spain or Italy. That's fascinating. So speaking of systems and communities that then influence how we see what as normal and the rules of engagement and things like that you're able to see it from there so sexuality is one and you mentioned parenting and spirituality so the idea is you go through the series of live courses are they live courses or everything we do is live basically so is there anything else you want to say about what you've learned related to attachment and community that might help folks that are not necessarily accessing this program, but to apply in their own community or in their own personal work.

36:05I mean, this is also where I'm curious about your experience, like what you've seen because you meet so many people who engage in communities. I would love to like dialogue a little bit around this. But what I've seen, what I've learned is that people are like, once they sort of get a sense of, for instance, what a corrective emotional experience is, Like when they learn how to tune that these are very human, natural skills. So I think what I've seen is that when attachment work and the parts of attachment repair is considered as skills, not only as epiphanies or insights or very sophisticated, difficult work, but as like real everyday skills.

36:49Like if I want to repair the rupture we just had, I can practice that. so I think it could be of course framed therapeutically but if it's framed also as like a learning process how do I learn secure relating as you put it as a verb rather than as this thing that happens to us like a secure attachment either I have it or I or I don't so I think from a community perspective to really empower and share the skills of secure relating and that's what we do also teach secure relating skills or practices I like that so two thoughts and I hope my ADD brain can hold both of them. One is just the whole skills piece, which I want to come back to.

37:30But the other is how do you view the unconscious? How do you view kind of shadow stuff, the other things that happen in community that takes us out of idealism or anything like that? Like, how does that look from your perspective? Yeah, you want to share an example or like give an example of what you're thinking? Well, that like, again, all this sounds great, but I also know that as humans show up with other humans, we are human and all of our stuff comes out. And I'm kind of doing a counterbalance thinking in terms of the unconscious and some of the ways that we can unconsciously get in our way.

38:07And do you all incorporate that or not? And then that's different than the skills stuff, right? Because like I think about DBT and mentalization and metacognition, those all are great. And like, it's kind of the problem of I can teach parenting lessons and I know exactly what to do and I can help you parent. But then I go home and I yell at my kid. Or I, you know, I like I lose the part of my mind that knows what to do or that cares about what to do. And then I'm when they're doing something that has been forbidden when I was young. Like, in other words, there's the unconscious piece where that all that goes out the window.

38:42I'm just trying to be realistic. I mean, it's also like a big topic, of course. But if I were to tie it a little bit into the internal working models, Because could we agree that the internal working models for a lot of people, for you and me included, they sit mostly unconscious. It's not that I walk around stating that today I'm feeling unlovable again. That's something that I sense or I walk around with this foggy sensation that this old belief is catching me. From that I become reactful and then I engage with people. And this, of course, will happen here as well. So I think what we do a lot is that we mirror and we work a lot with the process around these unconscious internal working models, the core beliefs.

39:28So I think that really is a big part of what we do. That's like several entire modules working only of trying to, not in an overly psychological way, trying to frame internal working models. But we really work with the core beliefs and internal working models so you can catch them as they show up. For instance, people are not reliable, for instance. That could be like an unconscious way. And if I act that out, and if I distrust you or I distrust people in the community or in the group that I'm with, then of course that will lead to acting out, to reactivity and all these things. So what we do a lot is we mirror this back, not as a diagnostic, but rather to increase reflective functioning or mentalization, that you say.

40:15what core belief or what idea around yourself might you be carrying around so i think this also comes back to the facilitation part that we do we put a lot of emphasis on facilitating attachment awareness is what we call it i really like that i think that's totally true this is why that we need help it's why that insight alone doesn't change anything but going back to the skills piece i can't believe i remembered i'm so happy i did because you know i just interviewed this researcher who works with borderline and narcissistic personality disorder, particularly using mentalization-based skills. And one of the things that I got out of that that I've been really thinking about, and that's why I'm thinking about it with this, is, you know, there's this idea that narcissism, you can't treat it.

41:01It's just somebody's personality, and there's not much to do about it. And he has a much more hopeful version of this. So we deep dove into that. And what he was talking about was that when you can, like they diagnose the person you struggle with narcissism, but in very specifically, this is what makes the disorder or the struggle. And I know I'm going diagnostic here, but I'll come back. But I've been really interested in it. It's like once you see like, oh, that's a failure of empathy, or I just re-centered something on myself, not the other person. Like when you break it down into those kinds of things that are learnable, well, then the groups are working on catching those things and helping with them.

41:45And then all of a sudden, in eight weeks, you are less nervous, like you're behaving in a way that is much more relational. So I've been thinking about that related to therapy in general and how it can go on for so long and how we could benefit from really doing this more skills-related piece. And so going back to what you're doing, this is really kind of what you've done, is that you've gotten the clinical language out of it, which I love. And then the group is all collectively working on these specific attachment-related skills that are measurable, that they become visible. It's a solution to the unconscious.

42:30Because as you write them out, as it's clear the things you're working on, it scaffolds it up into a more conscious place, which now we're in business. Now we can really do something. So that's exciting. It really is exciting. And I think the whole idea of the adult attachment injury, for instance, is to surprise the unconscious. That's like the essence of it to some extent. and as we know of course that that's a measure of reflective functioning which has turned into the mentalization-based treatments so what we have done or done our best to do is to take all of these dynamic ideas the metapsychologies the psychodynamic metapsychology of it and to bring this into also a practice-based community even though it doesn't come necessarily from the tradition of dbt or cognitive work i think it relies more on attachment theory and the psychodynamic models but still putting it into a skills model i love it that's that's the thing i've been so kind of wheeling on is what it's kind of more of the psychoanalytic piece might be missing you know it's like oh this is kind of going back old school into something that is more cognitive.

43:46Yeah, the way we teach it is like healing versus learning. So what parts of secure attachment or secure relating or moving to an earned secured state, what part of that has to do with healing or psychological repair, or what part of it has to do with learning? And of course, in my mind, it's both. And we can argue forever, of course, which pieces which. What I've seen and The idea that we have is to give constant feedback on effective mentalization as it happens live through the community. So while someone is bringing their issue into the group and they're effectively making sense of their experiencing, being both, of course, then mentalizing about the event and the second piece then, of course, would be affect regulation.

44:34and I mean affect in the whole sense of the word, not only like emotional regulation, being able to name the emotion, but really all the way down to interoception. This is where it sits in the body. This is where I'm experiencing rage as I'm remembering what happened, going from the solar plexus out into my arms and then constricting my breathing. This is what's going on. Yeah, so I think those three, like mentalization, affect regulation, and interoception, they could be considered skills, not only like therapeutic tools. And I think that's the way we also try to teach it in an educational format.

45:14I think that is very interesting, and I like it a lot. Now, part of how we came together was David Elliott. And David Elliott's work is probably familiar to many of our audiences. Can you just, just as we're kind of wrapping around here, but is the three pillars and his model related to that incorporated into your work? Yeah, to some extent. Funnily enough, as you know, David has a very thick book, and it used to sit underneath my computer for many, many years. That's the book I used to keep my computer up. So you could say it sits on some of that knowledge, both fingertips. Real quickly about that book.

45:55I so read it so it's actually right here you have to get this visual the cover is off see all these notes I tore it up reading it so thoroughly that he sent me another book he's like Sue you've really got to take care of that but anyway yes so somebody we both admire and love yeah same here I mean he's actually in Sweden tomorrow so we're probably getting together tomorrow but yeah but he was so kind to connect the two of us. So yeah, I've used and I've been inspired a lot by David and his work. And he spends quite a lot of time in Sweden also, as it turned out. But I really appreciate what David is doing also with the visualization and imagery and work that they're doing from the three pillars.

46:43So David is on the advisory board for the Secure Base Lab, among other great clinicians and researchers to really bring both sort of the wisdom and science of secure relating into the picture. So all of this, we are going to have a show notes loaded, but you also brought with us for our listeners, those of you that are still with us, which means you're interested in this material, speak some about what you're wanting to share with our listeners. Yeah. So if you want to learn more, you can just go to the secure baselab.com to learn more about what we're doing, join the newsletter. And we have an immersion coming up, a five-week immersion called the Secure Attachment Immersion in September.

47:27So that's something to look forward to. And then we're also planning to do a special event workshop for all the listeners of Therapist on Sensor, which will also be in the show notes. Great. So how do they access that? For all the listeners of the Therapist on Sensor podcast, you can go to the secure base lab.com slash tu and we're hosting a future workshop where we'll be diving into what we just talked about here and also we'll be having a q a for those of you especially interested in topics of attachment and community and sexuality and spirituality and all the things we got into so secure base lab.com is the gathering point what about free resources for folks?

48:13Are there articles or downloads or anything like that? I think one of the most valuable things we are offering, and to my knowledge, no one's doing that right now, we have, if you join the newsletter, then you're in for a monthly workshop. So we run 12 live workshops per year, once every month. So if you join the newsletter, you're in for the free workshops. That's a live workshop where you get to interact with our collective of therapists and you get to meet all the people who are also doing attachment work. That's what I mean by accessibility. We always want to think about that. And for the exchange of an email and being able to get the newsletter, then you get these free workshops.

48:59That's wonderful. Okay, is there anything else that we didn't cover? Just sort of the last word that as people are listening, if they remember nothing else, what do you want them to take away? I think the main thing, which is, I think, super obvious to most people is that the solo work or insight-based ways of working with attachment are great, but it's really in the original setting where they heal. So I think that's where I want to sort of end off. The original setting meaning group and community. Groups and community, yeah. Yeah, families are our first group experience. That's beautiful. Well, thank you very much for your generosity and for sharing this.

49:42And yeah, I do encourage people to check it out and even let us know what you think. If you are with us still, it does mean that you probably have gotten good value of this kind of content. We encourage you to share it with someone who might be interested. The best thing that you can do for us as far as helping other people find this free resource, we've got 10 years of these kinds of interviews that are chock full of resources and so much to learn and bridges to, like you said, the original researchers and clinicians that are doing this work is to share a rating and a review on wherever you're getting your podcast.

50:22What that does is it bumps us up in the algorithm or whatever, some sort of magic happens, and then it helps other people find it. And that's what we're interested in doing is making the science of attachment accessible to everybody all over the world. So that would help us a lot as a rating and a review. And otherwise, we do also have a community, therapistandcensored.com slash join. And there you will get some bonus content. But primarily what that also does is it helps us give some of our proceeds to people that have been left out, mental health for marginalized folks, people who have been historically left out.

51:00And that is something we're really committed to. And by joining our community, that helps that quite a bit. Okay, Secure Base Lab, Martin Johnson, thank you so much. Please keep us up to date about how you guys are doing. And, you know, I'm really cheering for you out here because I think it's so needed and it really answers a gap of service. Thank you. Thank you, Siren. thanks for having me on and yeah also I really want to end with thanking you for all the great content that you're putting out there it's one of my go-to podcasts privately awesome well thank you I appreciate you saying that alright everybody we will see you around the bend

51:49Therapist Uncensored is hosted by Anne Kelly and Sue Marriott this podcast is edited by Jack Anderson Thank you.