Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - And a Child Still Leads You

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Do you ever find it hard to express love to your partner? You know you love them and how important they are in your life, but for some reason, you can’t bring yourself to express it out loud. In most cases, it’s not the present that’s holding you back … it’s your past, specifically the things you experienced as a child.  In this Language of Love session, I spent time speaking with Connie. She loves her partner, but can’t express it to them. She grew up in a home where trauma was a constant companion, leading her to emotionally shut down to feel safe. We get into her past, revealing the little girl who still resides inside the grown woman, too scared to love out loud. And we begin charting a course for healing. In this episode, we’ll discuss: The many ways the expression of love is modeled (or not) in our families growing up.  The lingering effects of a childhood without reciprocal love on difficulty with attachment.  How being raised by an addict affects self expression in love and fosters insecure or avoidant attachment.  The path to healing attachment wounds   Resources and Links Dr. Laura Berman Language of Love Podcast Laura Berman Instagram – Dr Laura Berman Facebook – Dr Laura Berman Youtube.com – Dr Laura Berman  Additional Resources You’ve tried and tried, but you’re not getting the answers you need. Here’s the good news, the world is full of valuable resources. If you’re looking for someone specializing in Talk Therapy or Family of Origin of Family Addiction Issues, visit Psychology Today (www.psychologytoday.com), to find a provider in your area. If you’re interested in Somatic Healing, visit Trauma Healing (www.traumahealing.org) or Hakomi Institute (www.hakomiinstitute.com). Both of these websites will guide you to resources near you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman, and for the last 30 years, I've been helping people learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Sessions. This is where I get to work with you one-on-one, on air. You, my listeners, my goal in these sessions is to empower you to enjoy better relationships, both with others and with yourself, and to help you embrace how precious and sacred your body, your love life, and your sexuality really is. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Connie, welcome to the language of love. What's up? How can I help?

Well, I have a question about attachment styles. I listened to one of your other episodes and you had mentioned attachment styles. I had never really heard of that. And it turns out that I come out as avoidant fearful and my significant other is secure and he's feeling kind of unloved. So I'm interested in seeing if you can give me some tips for what I can do to sort of correct my avoidant attachment style? Yeah. Well, okay. So tell me a little bit about, I can imagine, but tell me a little bit about how, and just so everyone understands what we're talking about, when we talk about an avoidant attachment style, that's someone who tends to be more fearful in their attachment, more dramatic, more unpredictable, and most specifically really ambivalent, right?

So they'll often sabotage or pick fights or they'll love you or hate you. They feel kind of, they will avoid too much intimacy because it scares them, right? So that, just so everyone understands what we're talking about in a secure attachment style, their four attachment styles, the secure kind is competent, reciprocal, non-reactive. Actually, that's the rarity of the secure attachment. And then there's the anxious, preoccupied type, right? Those are the people that kind of need a ton of nurturing, intensely smothering, emotionally hungry all the time, need a lot of reassurance, a lot of security, blanketing, that kind of thing. and then there's the dismissive slash avoidant type who is really distant and kind of doesn't let you in and emotionally isolates themselves. So tell me how your fearful avoidant type of

attachment style plays out in your relationship. Give me a few examples. Well, I don't know if I agree with the fearful part. I think I'm more the dismissal avoidant. Okay. Well, that still comes from fear. But I don't know. I'm not very outwardly affectionate. And I feel funny saying these things, but I don't say I love you very often. And it has nothing to do with whether I love him. I do love him. And when I do say it, it feels awkward. And for me to initiate physical touch and stuff like that feels very awkward. And I hate to say I'm afraid because he's a wonderful man, there's nothing to be afraid of, but I feel like there's like this wall almost that I can't

get past. Well, so you're probably less, you're probably dismissive avoidant rather than fearful avoidant. Yeah, probably. Okay. So what was, I mean, I can guess from how it's playing out in your life, what you're basically saying is that it's really awkward and uncomfortable for you to express verbal or physical affection or give words of affirmation. But inside yourself, are you saying that you feel really confident in how you feel about him and you really do love him and you're not ambivalent about being in the relationship? That's correct. Okay. Why that usually happens is we develop a kind of avoidance of that kind of intimacy because it either wasn't returned to us, or more likely it was never modeled for us and it was an emotionally unsafe

environment growing up, right? So even though intellectually you know this man is not going to rebuff your affection, it feels awkward and uncomfortable because A, you don't have a lot of practice, I'm guessing, from your childhood. You probably didn't grow up with a lot of physical affection and words of affirmation, I'm assuming? No, certainly not from my father. Yeah. And so, I mean, all we need is one parent, unfortunately, or one key caregiver. I mean, it's worse when it's both of them, but all we need is one to mess us up. But if you don't have that, right, and you probably didn't see it either, right? So not only did you not receive

it, but you didn't have it modeled for you with your parents or with any caregivers, correct? Right. My dad had a substance abuse problem. So while I hate to say that, because again, I love him dearly. There was obviously some dysfunction in the family. Yeah. And when there is addiction in the house and I grew up with addiction, too, I have lots of addiction in my family. When you grow up with addiction, the addiction is that person's first love, especially, obviously, until it's treated and that person stays sober. I'm not saying this is true for addicts who are in recovery, but addicts who are active addicts and aren't recovered or recovering, their addiction is their first love. Nothing is more important than that. And so they end up giving the message in a million different ways that that is true, right? And so what your acts of love, affection, reaching out were met with lots of unpredictability, right? probably if your dad was sober he was more responsive when he was wasted he was not

responsive maybe he was even rageful maybe he was even abusive i'm not going to make you talk about all of it but i have a feeling he was at least well and he wasn't real he didn't show a lot even when he was not using he didn't show a lot of physical affection at least not to us yeah yeah to anyone and so you didn't have a model for it it wasn't you probably don't even remember this but children naturally i don't know if you have children but you will see children all you have to do is go to a playground or watch them with their parents children are naturally extremely affectionate they run up and throw their arms around you they climb into your lap they snuggle in you know that's just natural for them and when that is not returned the child starts to

internalize that as a being about them and be shutting that part of themselves down because it's unsafe because I don't know how it's going to be met. So in your case, I feel like it's a combination of that having been rebuffed and rejected. And so there is some fear in there, even though intellectually, I'm not saying you feel fear with your husband, but there's this little girl part of you that when it's time to show affection or affirm your affection you feel anxious right yes so that's the little girl part of you that's driving the bus then because you're in a vulnerable even though the grown-up you knows that there's nothing scary about this and of course he's going to love it right there's a part of you that feels unsafe doing it a b you also don't have

the practice of doing it or the model for how to do it because you never had that. But how brilliant are you that you fell in love with someone who is secure enough to be able to hold this while you work it out? It's just sheer dumb luck. I don't think so. I think we always choose people unconsciously for the ways in which they are going to trigger us or push us to grow, right? So he chose you on some level. I'm not saying this is ever conscious, but it is always true. I have yet to meet a relationship and I've met many where the issue between you isn't in large part why you unconsciously chose each other. I'm not saying there weren't a million other reasons, but unconsciously, we are attracted

to people that are going to push our growth edges. And so here you go. You're welcome. But it's really honestly, I mean, I'm assuming you've been in therapy about your childhood and worked through some of the trauma because there is trauma there for sure. I'm not saying it's huge, like homeless, thrown on the street, horrible abuse trauma, but there are, it was lots of trauma. There was lots of uncertainty. There was a lot of emotional insecurity and ups and downs and unpredictability that creates chaos and fear in the child very naturally. So listen, regardless of your sexual orientation or your gender or your relationship status, every single one of us has struggled at one point or another with a lackluster or disconnected sex life or difficulty finding the

partner that we most desire. So I have designed an amazing program for you, Seven Days to Better Sex. Each day, you're going to get a video and an information packet all designed to help you jumpstart your love life. Just go to www.drlauraberman.com. So have you been in any treatment at all for any of that? I started going to some counseling, I don't know, a year and a half ago, but I just, I didn't really feel like we were getting anywhere, but maybe I, because I told him that I wanted relationship counseling. Maybe I told him the wrong thing. Maybe that's not what I should have told him. I don't know. Yeah. Well, are you saying, I mean, if I understand you correctly, the main, the relationship is relatively good, except your husband feels,

is longing for and feel, doesn't feel loved by you in a language and in a way that really lands with him yeah that's i think so but it's not like you're in a lot of conflict or there's a lot of discord between the two of you no if they're generally if there is it's because of this issue yeah so yeah i don't think it's couples therapy i think you need to do some individual therapy to and maybe even you guys know that i'm a huge fan of somatic experiencing especially around trauma and around early trauma which you definitely have it's really helpful somatic experiencing because i think it's for you it's probably a matter of both because my guess is you haven't spent any real time in any kind of therapeutic environment talking about your

childhood and when we don't do that it's sort of accidentally normalized in our mind and until we really start talking about it and having it reflected back to us by a trained person who understands the impact of these family dynamics it's really hard to understand how they affected us and then without that awareness it's really hard to heal so if i could write your prescription it would be for a combination of individual talk therapy and individual somatic experiencing and maybe even dovetail the two every other week and make it specifically about this issue And as you do that, if you do that for like three months or so, right, so you've had 12 sessions by then, six somatic experiencing, six talk therapy sessions, then you will be ready to start pushing through your resistance. I mean, you can do that now, but it's going to be it's not going to come naturally to you and it's going to be really hard. Right. So I could say to you, Connie, I want you to put a alarm on your smartphone every four hours.

And when that alarm goes off, I want you to go and give your husband a hug and tell him I love you or I want you to text him I love you or show, you know, express an appreciation to him about something he's done or the way he looks that day or whatever else. We could create those practical strategies that do work, but in my experience, they're hard to sustain. They're more like a Band-Aid, but the wound underneath needs to heal for it to be really sustainable. You know what I mean? Yeah, I've actually tried on my own to do some of that where I've said, okay, I'm going to really make this effort. And I mean, first of all, it really feels like an effort and I feel like it shouldn't feel like an effort. I love this man. Yeah. And like you said, it wasn't sustainable. I could keep doing it even though I felt uncomfortable, but at some point it's just because it doesn't feel comfortable. I don't do it so much. And then I sort of go back into my old habits. Yeah. And so the reason you can't sustain it and commit to it is because you

haven't dealt with the stuff underneath it. All that understood, it's still going to be uncomfortable for you for a while until you practice it and get more comfortable with it and the sky doesn't fall on your head and nobody rejects you. But you already know all that. The woman I'm talking to already knows all that. It's the little girl part of you that doesn't know that. And she's the one that needs to be heard, that needs to be healed, that needs to be understood and whose trauma needs to be released. And when you do that, a million areas of your life are going to improve, most especially your relationship. But it's not just, I guarantee you, it's not just affecting your relationship. It affects our self-worth. It affects our confidence. It

affects our ability to express our needs. It affects our ability to express our authentic feelings. It affects our ability to show up authentically. So there's so many ways in which this kind of childhood impacts us that we don't really understand until we start diving into healing. And in love relationships, because those relationships are the closest to our family of origin in terms of the intimacy the connection the behind closed door aspect of it and the high stakes emotionally right because they're it's high emotional stakes that's where the shit comes up right that's where this stuff is going to come up to be healed and that's why i always say that your partner is really your greatest healing inspiration and your greatest

teacher. So that would be what I would recommend for you, if that makes sense. That's why maybe in your friendships or at work, this little girl doesn't drive the bus as much. But in this high stakes, intimate setting, which really brings up a lot of those old issues from childhood, she is going to be stepping in and driving the bus. And she's the one who feels awkward. She's the one that is struggling to do it. Right. Because if it were up to you, you understand all this. Right. But there is a part of you, namely your inner child part who isn't cooperating and she just needs some love, some attention to be heard, to be healed. And then you'll be good. Yeah. It almost feels like sometimes like I'm like, I really am holding back. I don't mean to

hold back yeah she's the one that's holding back she doesn't feel safe and she learned thank goodness you know this is what's so cute about us is that when we're children like we are freaking brilliant we are survivors and we figure out what we need to do to survive whether it's what we need to do to get love or what we need to do to get safety or both right and so we bend ourselves into pretzels. We shut down parts of ourselves. We disconnect from parts of ourselves. We develop strategies. We shut down parts of our heart, whatever is required. We're not thinking about the long-term consequences. We can't even think about the future at that age. All we're doing is reacting to our environment and accommodating to it. And the problem with that is while that's an

amazing strategy and it works for a little child in love relationships, it doesn't work, right? So she's still operating according to her old strategies and she doesn't, she hasn't been able to be heard and healed enough to loosen the reins and to feel safe enough that she's going to be okay, right? Even though you know you're going to be okay, that part of you doesn't know. And that's what the therapy is about, is about attending to that part of you and helping to reintegrate that part of you into the whole, back into the whole, and to feel held and protected by grown up Connie and to know that she's protected and is allowed to feel and is

allowed to love and is welcome to love and her love will be returned. But she doesn't fully understand that until she's able to be heard and healed. OK, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, it does. So so I'll have to see if I can find somebody in my area to do these things. Yeah. So I would look for an individual therapist. Maybe you could call your doctor's office or even psychology today, I have found some good referrals through to people, you know, who are in weird towns that I don't know anyone in, or I can't refer them to. If you're looking for someone for a talk therapist, you're looking for someone who specializes in what's called family of origin issues or addiction, family addiction issues, but it's usually under the guise of family of origin

issues. So that's for like the talk therapist. And then for somatic experiencing, you can go to traumahealing.org or hakomiinstitute.com, H-A-K-O-M-I institute.com. We can put these in the show notes as well for everyone. But if you go to those, you can put in your zip code or your town and you can find a somatic experiencing therapist in your area. Okay. Okay. I'll have to do that. All right. So I want you to try to do that. And in an ideal world, alternate every other week for three months. And then I want you to get back to us and tell us how you're doing. Okay. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. You're on the right track. I'm really glad you called. And this is half the battle, recognizing there's an issue and being willing to

address it. So thank you. Hopefully in a few months I can call you and it'll be all different. amen keep us posted okay we'll be cheering you on all right thank you i went to the doctor said i'm crazy for your love love wrote me a prescription but there is no cure for