Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Safe in Love: Building More Secure Relationships with Jessica Baum

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

Why does it always seem like déjà vu when it comes to your love life? Ever catch yourself wondering, “Why does every guy I date end up cheating, no matter who he is?” Or maybe you’re on the flip side thinking, “Why does every woman I date always seem to have anger issues?”  It’s almost like you’re stuck in a dating loop, attracting the same person in a different body. But why does this keep happening? In this Language of Love Conversation, I sit down with therapist and relationship expert Jessica Baum, author of new book Safe, to explore why our love lives so often play out like déjà vu. Jessica takes us far beyond attachment labels like “anxious” or “avoidant.” She reveals how our parents’ nervous systems wire our own from infancy, shaping the way we connect, attach, and seek safety. Those early wounds often live in our bodies as sensation, surfacing later when a partner pulls away, rolls their eyes, or simply doesn’t show up the way we need. If you’re ready to stop repeating old patterns, this episode is your first step. We explore:  Why traditional attachment labels don't tell the whole story and what does. How to tell the difference between your "thinking" left brain and your "feeling" right brain. The surprising reason you keep attracting the same type of partner (and how to break the cycle). Why "triggers" are actually invitations for healing and how to reframe them. How memory is stored not just in your mind, but in your gut, heart, and muscles. What it truly means to heal in a relationship, and why you can't do it alone. The subtle signs your nervous system is scanning for to answer, "Are you with me?" A powerful, real-life example of rupture and repair between a parent and adult child. Practical steps to start creating safety within yourself and your relationships. Remember to check out Jessica’s other books, including Anxiously Attached. And don’t forget to preorder your copy of Safe, coming out on October 28. It’s the manual your relationships have been missing. As a special gift for listeners, she’s offering free bonuses, including a deep-dive healing blueprint and a rare interview with her mentor. You can find her at jessicabaumlmhc.com and on Instagram @jessicabaumlmhc  If you want to share your own love story, I’d love to hear it. Send me an email at [e-mail]. Want to know what you really want in love? Take the quiz  now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the past 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Here on the Language of Love Conversations, I'm talking to some of the world's most influential and revolutionary experts, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, and celebrities about love, sex, and relationships from a mind, body, and spirit perspective. and that way my goal is to awaken your mind body and soul it's time to become fluent in the language of life jessica baum has helped thousands of clients with her unique approach to healing

and she's a therapist who invites you into a new way of relating not only to others but with yourself. Her focus and the focus of her new book, Safe, isn't about fixing what's broken. It's about gently uncovering what's been protecting you, understanding where your patterns came from, and learning how to create the kind of safety that allows for real intimacy to grow. So if you want to get closer in love, if you want to step out of those patterns that aren't serving you in your relationships, those places where you're stuck in conflict or fear or anger, you definitely want to listen to this episode of The Language of Love. Jessica Baum, thank you so much for joining us on The Language of Love.

Thank you so much for having me here today. I'm excited to talk about your new book and about, obviously there's lots of books out there and there's lots of people talking about the different attachment styles and we'll get into those a little. I mean, most people have heard about the different attachment styles. We will review them. I think that's important, but what I am most interested in talking to you about, and I appreciated this about your book because you didn't even get into the attachment styles

until way into the book, which I think is great. But what's important about the book is that it guides readers through the process of like how to heal what you need to heal, understand where your wounds are that that are probably getting in the way of you not only necessarily attracting in a partner that is going to be able to create healthy love with you, but to be able to sustain that relationship. Very often on this show, you know, we talk a lot about relationships, obviously, and we get lots of questions about kind of that are essentially they're not asked this way, but are essentially about moving from that initial stage where everything is perfect and everything is amazing and you can't get enough of each other and you're both presenting your best selves. Right.

And then eventually life comes in, circumstances come in, something comes in, and that's when you start to see conflict. And that's often when you can start to see people's quote unquote triggers come forth. And I really appreciated how you were kind of advocating for changing this idea of triggers or, or what they're called. So let's just start there. Well, thank you so much for reading the material. I can see that you already like deeply get it And you're a hundred percent right. Like I dive deep into attachment from more of a holistic point of view. So it's different than what's out there, which is like, read this book. And we're just going to tell you the categories. I want the reader to understand from infancy, basically how

they formed certain patterns and how it's related to the nervous system and our sense of safety. And I really wanted them to get like a somatic understanding of this. And I present the wheel of attachment, which was very different than what's out there, because I want people to understand that it's, it's not just a label. Like we move on a spectrum and we have many different attachment experiences. And yes, if, if you buy my book, you will be kind of pushed in the direction of not only locating your core wound, but actually understanding what it means from the neuroscientific level as to how to heal and what healing really is and how that really is facilitated in your body and in what relationships we can heal. So I want people to really have this

information because there's so many people suffering and it's needed because you can't heal without understanding the process and what is exactly needed in order to move through these attachment or developmental traumas and heal them. Yeah. And when we say traumas, guys, let's even start here. I find as a therapist myself, so often, even when I'm just talking to someone socially or in a circumstance, you know, where they're talking about their lives or whatever people say, Oh no, I didn't have any trauma. And then as you did, cause they think trauma means my house burned down. My parents abused me. My neighbor raped me, God forbid. Like they're all these different, somebody died, somebody was deathly ill. Yes, those are all traumas, but

you are still experiencing trauma when your divorced dad repeatedly doesn't show up for visitation, right? You're experiencing trauma when you spill paint all over the floor and your mother doesn't talk to you for the rest of the day and pretends you're not there. There are all of these subtle things that we just think, oh no, my parents were great. But like every time she got angry, she locked me out in the backyard and didn't let me in the house, but you know, I wasn't traumatized. Right. So I don't even like talking about big T and little T trauma. Cause I just feel like trauma is trauma, but I'm wondering if we can even start there. I love that you brought that up and you're absolutely right. And a lot of clients that come to us, they don't have the somatic or

embodied awareness around how these little quote unquote events really deeply impact our world when we're that tiny. And so I think people want to minimize it and it's a form of protection, right? And until we're in a coaching or a therapeutic or even a really deep friendship where someone is attuning to us and they're checking in with us and they're looking into our inner world and they're supporting us emotionally in a way that maybe we never received our whole life, it's usually then when a client says, oh my God, like my parents didn't have the capacity to slow down and be with me when I, when I needed, or when I was scared all the time. And these little incidences are just a sign of some emotional neglect, no one's fault. And most people, if people listening to this right

now, a lot of people are really unaware of this until they start to receive what they didn't get. And then they start to put the pieces together. And it's never about blaming our parents, right? But they give us what they can. But part of repairing attachment wounds is about receiving from a new nervous system what we didn't get. And until we get that level of attunement and co-regulation, it's really hard to have that moment of like, oh, now I understand.

My parents were just too stressed out or too busy or too much in their left hemisphere and too busy trying to accomplish things that they didn't slow down and attune with me enough. So I developed this strategy or I relate in this way. So we start to put the pieces together through healthy relational experiences. Yeah, and I love that. You spoke a lot, which I feel so strongly about.

We can only heal in relationship and that doesn't have to be a love relationship. That can be a friend relationship. That can be a coach or a therapist. But let's start even, and you get a lot into the neuroscience We'll get into that, too. I really want to talk about the left versus right brain and how it plays out in attachment.

But let's just start here. We're touching into it. But before we get into what the core issues were and where it started, how does it play out in our love relationships? Like, why does someone why is it helpful to even feel safe besides the fact that it's much more comfortable and life is better? But when it comes to relationships, why do we want to heal these attachment wounds? How does it play out in our relationships if we don't?

If we don't, we can become very left shifted. We can avoid relationships. We can become very accomplished, focused, which there's nothing wrong with that, but it becomes very lonely when we don't learn how to get vulnerable and ask for our needs and repair what was there. We also tend to repeat our dynamics, per se. I talk a lot about the book, like we call in and we're gravitated towards our familiar. So, you know, there's a lot of research around what are implicit, what's stored in our body

longs to be expressed. And we often are attracted to people that will ironically repeat the same experiences in another context that we've been through earlier in life and that we're unconscious about. So cool part of a Mago therapy, which is that, which I do. And, you know, I talk about in the book is that part of the work in all relationships is to get conscious of the original wound. And so if we don't get conscious, we can find ourselves with the same core wound in the same pattern showing up completely differently.

We might get a new partner that seems completely different. And there we are again, left again or feeling this again. And so it keeps manifesting until we do the work. Yes, 100 percent agree. I always quote that line from Rent, the musical, where she says, I'm looking for someone whose baggage goes with mine because we always seem to be attracted to people who and I feel like on some level, you know, and that's related to what we're talking about is healing and relationships on some level from a metaphysical or even meta level. that's the purpose of relationships is to elevate ourselves to be each other's allies and healing and every single one of us I don't care what kind of childhood you had none of us had perfect ones and there's always issues but I always think it's so interesting you know you'll have let's say you

had an alcoholic mother or father and you had a really traumatic childhood around that or a lot of trauma around that and you're like I'm never going to drink you know I'm only going to date sober people. I'm not going to date anyone who drinks. And then you meet someone and they like, oh no, I don't drink. I don't smoke. And then it turns out they're a gambling addict, right? And you had no idea. Like we smell it on people because there's a way, like you said, that we're wanting unconsciously until we heal it. We're wanting to work it out in relationship and we're attracted. If you have wounds around abandonment, you're going to repeatedly attract people who abandon you or who emotionally abandon you. So I get that question so often. Why does every guy I

date cheat no matter who he is? Or why does every woman I date end up having anger issues? So we see it play out in relationships and you give a lot of really beautiful examples of these more subtle and overt ways. It plays out in conflict and repeated patterns that aren't serving you in your relationship. So if you have those guys, which let's face it, most of us do, it very likely is related to some of these earlier life attachment wounds. Now you talk a lot about neuroscience, which I geek out on too. Let's talk about like, I really liked what you were saying about the left and right brain and how they relate to attachment. That was really interesting and new to me. So can you dig into that a little bit? Yeah, sure. I mean, that's a really complicated

topic, but our brain is wired by our parents' brain. And as infants and as newborns, we're not fully developed in human form. We're still developing our heart. We're still developing our brain. So we mirror and kind of wire to our parents. So if our parents are more in survival mode, if they're more achievement focused, if they're more oriented to tasks and not in touch with their emotional world, they're a little bit more, they're left shifted. And unfortunately, many parents in our culture, because this is supported, are more left shifted and we're moving towards more avoidance. So they meet our needs, like our physical needs, but they tend to not emotionally attuned to the child as well. And so that child ends up becoming more avoidant as

well. So those are people who focus on achievement and task oriented, but they have a harder time registering other people's emotions and connecting deeply. And I think moving into the left hemisphere is a way for us to protect ourselves from the stored pain and trauma in our body from the right hemisphere. I know that's been, and I write about this in my book. I am not avoidant per se. I wrote the book anxiously attached before this, but I used workaholism as a way unconsciously to avoid the pain in my body until I had enough support to move more into my right hemisphere and start to feel some of this. So many people in our culture are raised by people that are more left shifted. And the problem with that is that is why we have the epidemic of loneliness.

And this is why we're not connecting on a deeper level. And connection is really biologically what we're wired for. It's what gives us a heartfelt life. It's what gives us meaning. So we want to learn to shift out of the left, to slow down, to become more embodied and shift more into the right hemisphere. And that's part of the embodiment work around healing, you know, what is stored and what our earlier experiences have embedded in our system.

Yeah. And so let's talk about embodiment. That's a huge part of the work that I do as well. And I think you explain it so well in the book, this idea of how trauma is held in the body and this concept of interception, the presence in our bodies, right? That when we can get present in our bodies and out of that analytical mind, talk about that process a little bit. Yeah.

So interception is the ability to feel the sensations in our body. And I don't know anyone who's listening, I can vouch this happened to me too, but as a way to stay protected, we can become disconnected from our bodily sensations. And if our parents weren't tracking our bodies and asking us what's going on inside of us and what are we feeling, and let's face it, we all grew up in a society where parents just weren't trained this way, we don't build the interoception capacity. We don't have it as strongly linked as someone who's very secure. So we need to start to practice going into the body and feeling sensation.

Like a huge part of this book is about implicit memory. And what I want people to understand is that sensation is memory. So when we're born, we don't have explicit memory ability. We don't remember being born really per se. We don't remember like a movie, like going to Disneyland. When we're born from womb to fore, we only store sensation. So when your partner doesn't call you back or when your partner rolls his eyes at you or when you feel someone give you a blank stare and they're not with you and your gut falls to the ground or you're feeling your heart rate or you're getting really upset, those sensations are actually early memories. And we start to pay attention to them and link them to the original wound.

And we start to understand our internal system different. And we start to build the capacity to listen to what's going on inside, connect it to a deeper level, and actually move it, integrate it so that it doesn't carry as much charge. So there is this science behind that. So it's pretty complicated, but it's so cool that at any age with the right support in the right environment, you can develop more interoception and you can move these sensational experiences and get a little bit more freedom and fulfillment in your life and not have them control all of your behaviors. Yeah, I think that's so important. And you give some great

examples in the book about couples and because the way this plays out is you're reacting from so your partner rolls their eyes, you're not even aware that you're going back to when you were three years old and somebody scoffed at your needs and you were dismissed and not attended to and you felt abandoned and uncared for or a lack of approval, which kids confuse, you know, we confuse approval and love because if we don't have approval, we're not really safe. And so that happens and you're not even aware of the physiologic cascade and the old wounds that are coming up and then that causes a reaction in you. And then your reaction causes a reaction in your partner. And once again, we're back to that triggering each other's wounds thing. So

as you work as even individually, much less as a couple to start to explore what's underneath the thought, the body feeling, and then go back to where that feeling began and to some of those earlier childhood wounds, which you weren't even considering and maybe didn't even think were a wound until you go back to it now as the adult you are now, two things happen. First, you get really clear, you get so much clearer and you're able to sort of release some of the charges you said, but also, and I thought you did a really good job of kind of demonstrating this in the stories that your partner, if they're bearing witness to this, has a new level of compassion around those irritating, triggering or annoying behaviors or reactions that you have, because now

they're seeing you through the lens of compassion versus just your behavior. A hundred percent. And I think, you know, I do something called a Mongo therapy, which helps in that dynamic, but also when, and if you read the book, you really start to understand that all of our intense reactions have deeper roots. And when our partner, even if we can't change the reaction right away, when we start to understand the roots together, there's a level of compassion, like you said, empathy that builds that even after we can reframe or start to talk about where the root is, it starts to slowly shift these patterns. Remember, these patterns are habitual, they're implicit, and they're automatic, and they happen fast. So I tell my couples,

it's not about changing the pattern overnight. The first step is awareness. And then even when we're stuck in these patterns, we can change our communication with each other even after. And slowly over time, we change something called response flexibility. So slowly over time, we're having conversations with ourselves. We're relating to ourselves and our partners differently. We understand the roots and we can change these longstanding patterns that were habitual. And it does take quite a bit of work. But man, does it deepen a relationship. I mean, that is where like the deeper levels of love and intimacy start to really blossom in couples when they start to unpack this stuff together and they start to understand the complexity and the history and the different levels. And it doesn't just become around my husband isn't taking the garbage out or every time you do this, it bothers me.

We start to really understand what's going on. And every relationship that I've helped in that way, absolutely. The intimacy, the compassion and the empathy deepen. And the safety, right? Because we can only create that safety with someone else. And, you know, there's these different kind of hue centers you talk about, the heart, brain, the muscles, the gut, these unconscious reactions. For most of us, it's unconscious, especially if we're living in our left brain versus our more intuitive in the body, embodied presence part of the brain, the right brain. So speak to that a little bit, because I think it's important for people to understand, even as they're listening, because they're probably going to identify, oh, yeah, I'm familiar with that sensation she's talking about. So can you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah. And I'm just so grateful for you because you really like understand the material and you read it. And that just means so much to me. But yeah, I I talk about different memory centers in the brain. And really, our gut is called the second brain that we have the same neurotransmitters in there. We process relationships in our gut.

I mean, sometimes this can show up as irritable bowel syndrome, or when you get into a bad fight, some people curl up in the gut. We also have a lot of centers in our heart brain that store connection, joy, and loss of connection. So we store memory in these centers. We store in our fascia and in our muscles. So our muscles, remember, if you have that teacher that was critical and mean, and you start to think about them, your muscles might tighten up. So our body remembers so much more

than our skull brain. I talk about the embodied brain and these, when we start to like, I did a session with a woman today at one of my, I love this client and she keeps such a knot in her stomach. And so we keep going back there slowly and went not the whole session. And we start to understand that this gut wrenching feeling that she has in her stomach was actually a sensation that she lived in constantly when she was a little girl. And it's about me and her holding it together now slowly so that we build the capacity together to hold the original event.

And eventually it loses its charge. It gets integrated. We can hold it through my window and her window. So, you know, when you start to understand the body this way, I'm sorry, traditional talk therapy goes out the window because these types of memory centers start to connect on such a deeper level. And I see so much more transformation and real change

happening when we start to have this conversation about the other memory centers in the body. I agree. Yeah. I mean, I think talking, I always say that I'm a, my kids used to call me a talking doctor when, you know, when they were little, because they knew I was a doctor and they knew that I didn't work on people's bodies. And I would, so I said, I just talked to people to help them feel better. So I've gone from being a talking doctor for many years to, I would say over the past decade doing a lot less talking, I think it's important, the talking piece to understand the context and the dynamics and the strategies and the logistical stuff is really important. But when it comes to this and really healing those wounds that allow us to really

feel safe and intimate in love or in relationships, it's really so much of it is in the body. And I like how you kind of are advocating for throwing out the idea of trigger, which is way overused and used in lots of ways that trigger people when they hear that word and calling it awakened memory. I thought that was, that was a good idea because you're kind of recharacterizing it to understand that it's not necessary. It's not a bad thing. It's an invitation to heal. Absolutely. And I can personally say that the word trigger used to bring up so much shame in me because I have big feelings.

You know, I would think, oh, man, here I go. I'm triggered again. And when I reframed it, it's so much more than a reframe, because when you start to say, oh, my God, what's being awakened in me right now, what you're doing is you're shifting out of the shame. And the word trigger is like so violent, too. Right. And you're saying, oh, my God, something's being awakened in me.

And now you're getting in relationship with the experience differently. So if something younger or vulnerable or scared or angry is being awakened in me, I can start to speak to it, attend to it, bring it to someone who understands it. I can start to be with it differently rather than just like this repeated trigger cycle. It's now an opportunity for healing. And essentially that's what it is. So just the reframe, the reframe alone, but also the relationship, which I hope that the next level gets pushed in the book is that we reframe it.

And now the relationship to the experience changes. And let's face it, it sucks to go through this stuff. It's not fun. Like I get it. Like I've, I've been through it. I talk deeply about that, but when we can go through it with the right support and we have the right information, it's like, we do really heal it. It's not just this repeated thing that we're having to go through.

So I wanted to give people hope and a shift in relationship with their own body and their own experience. Hey, it's Dr. Laura Berman. I've been a sex, love and relationship therapist for over 30 years. And the main question I always get asked is how the heck do we spice it up in a long-term monogamous relationship? Well, if you want to take your love life, your sex life to the next level, whether you're in a relationship or not, check out my free course on quantum sex. It's going to teach you how to take your sexual response to the next level, capable of full body orgasms, how to use sex magic to manifest your dreams and how to connect on an even deeper level sexually with your partner.

Just go to Dr. Laura Berman dot com and you'll find it right there on the home page. The quantum sex free course. Check it out. Let me know what you think. Yeah, I want to get into healing, you know, and I will say that this was I've been married for 23 years, so I guess this was probably. I don't know, seven to 10 years into our marriage. we went through this you know as many evolutions in our relationship many recalibrations and in

this one back then it changed everything because we started speaking from the body so like he would do or say something and instead of responding to it the way I normally would I would say you know as you do this or as I'm listening to you I just am noticing that I have this tightness in my chest and a pit in my stomach. And then we would say what I'm feeling, that sort of thing. We're not at this point going into the healing part, but even just that starting there, being able to just name my reaction and my physiologic reaction, I wasn't making meaning, I wasn't making accusations, he would respond differently. And just that started to change the whole dynamic. So it's so powerful when you start to get, become aware and take a little step back and even just attune

to your body. Or even just the other day, my girlfriend told me something that I had accidentally done. And this is a girlfriend I feel extremely safe with that I had accidentally done, or maybe in this case, not done. I hadn't validated or given her credit for something that she felt she needed credit for or something like that. And she was asking me to do something that I didn't really feel in alignment with. What was going to make her quote unquote feel better was if I did something that just didn't feel right to me. And what I said to her at the time was, you know, which was the truth. I am noticing I have a huge pit in my stomach right now listening to you because I'm feeling scared and the codependent in me who wants your love and wants you to feel safe,

wants to give you exactly what you want, but it doesn't feel an integrity right now. So I'm in this little struggle. Can we just be with that for a minute? And she of course could, which was really beautiful example, I think on some level of what you're talking about, but let's get into healing these attachment wounds and what that looks like. Obviously working with someone is important, but what does it look like to heal? How does one heal? Yeah. And you know, it's working with someone you can't, you know, what was wounded in a relationship has to heal in relationship. And you know that just as much as I do, but it's important for people to understand that too. If the attachment wound was really early,

you need another nervous system to witness you. And in my book, and I, Bonnie Badenoch is my mentor and she studies relational neuroscience. There's a lot around receiving what we didn't get at the original wound. So if the original wound was abandonment, what we need to be seen and held in that intensity. And in those moments by another person who sees that we were abandoned and can witness us and hold all the terror, or if we were ashamed, we need to be seen and held and accepted, right? So these earlier experiences, and usually they live in the body and we can float back into time and they come up organically. That's another thing I should say. Real true healing happens in safe relationships where our nervous system legitimately feels safe. You cannot

fake safety. So you have to sit with a person who has safety in their system enough. And I talk about that concept of neuroception and what that means to sit with you and your own memory system starts to wake up and they hold you enough where neural nets open and we can go into the body. And that all happens organically. That is the inherent wisdom of your body, of your healing blueprint of what you need and everybody's different. But in my experience with clients that I can really hold a lot of safety for, it comes up organically over time. Now I have had clients in the left hemisphere. It take a really long time for them to shift and that's okay. You were constantly as clinicians meeting people where they're at. I've also had clients who've

been able to develop safety relatively fast and then regress and all of these kind of images and sensations start to surface. But all of that happens through a nervous system state called ventral, which we shift in and out of the other person being safe enough. And for our nervous system to recognize that safety and in the combined experience of our nervous system being held by somebody else's safe nervous system, the organic blueprint through of our attachment traumas and all of that will surface. And hopefully the anchoring person knows how to hold that space and allow for that process to unfold. And it is as individual as our fingerprint, right? It depends on what's happening in our environment, who's in our life, what is

awakened in us right now, how well that person can hold space for us. So everybody's journey is a little bit different, but when we start to shift into the right and we get into implicit information, it does, you can really feel like it's a little bit more of a journey. Let's say it's a little bit more sensational. You're a little bit more awoke, right? You're starting to really get in touch with these things. So it can actually be a little bit harder sometimes in the beginning when we start to become more aware of what's been hiding out in our body and the attachment trauma and that stuff. Yeah. I think that, and it's so important to say that because when, and we'll often see this in relationships, when you are in a relationship that finally feels

safe, often you'll start recovering memories of traumatic things that you didn't even ever think about before, because now your nervous system is safe. And in the same way, the way you're describing when you are in a relationship and you talk in the book about whether these anchors, these safe, you know, as a coach or a therapist, or even a friend, there are certain friends and you even give some exercises for how to kind of technically hold space or listen in a thoughtful way, which I think is really valuable, but that's what starts to happen. And, you know, it's interesting because for me, my eldest is now turning 29 and is healing his own traumas. Many of them have nothing to do with, you know, have to do with having cancer as a young child

and horrible things that happened just as a result of the treatment and all of those traumas. But a lot of the trauma is around me and things that I was doing back or not doing in my very left brained existence back then where I was actively, I mean, this was almost 30 years ago. I've been in recovery for codependency for maybe almost 20 years, I would say, maybe 15 years. So for a lot of his childhood, I was a codependent neurotic left brain, totally driven cuckoo bird who thought I was awake. And so it's been really powerful and often painful, but really powerful to be able. I mean, he's working with a therapist and has been, but to also be one who he can come to and be like, hey, this was really fucked up when this happened, or this is how it really felt. And what I really needed was this. And you did that. And for me to be able to just calm my nervous system down, deal with my own escalation and elevation, stay safe for him and for myself and be and not argue with him. I mean, sometimes I'll be like, well, that's not exactly what happened, but close enough, you know, and I'm sorry, right? Like I can see and feel the healing in him when that happens and the healing in me if

I can deal with the shame. But I'm wondering if you can speak to that, because a lot of my peeps here are parents, some with younger children, some with older children. But we are this is what I've said to them since they were little because I understood this. You know, I would jokingly say, but like, listen, I'm doing the best I can. I know I'm screwing you up. but it's all coming from a place of love and we'll work it through. And I don't think a parent,

as much as we see all these videos and social media, do this and you'll have healthy attached kids and don't do this. And, you know, there's all of these quote unquote rules. And we've, and I thought the same thing as someone who had two masters and a PhD by the time my kid was born and had studied child development. I thought for sure, I'm going to raise an emotionally healthy kid, not realizing or thinking about all the ways that I was going to screw him up. So I'm wondering if you can speak to that, to parents about, obviously we can't safeguard everything, but what would you say to parents who are actively parenting now and, or like me are facing some of the aftermath that they've accidentally or usually accidentally helped

create? Oh my God, that's such an important question. And I so commend you in the rupture and repair that you're doing right now with your son. I think part of the healing process that I find for myself, but also with clients is first, when you're moving through it, you do get a little angry with your parents because you're starting to wake up to how they impacted you. When you do a lot of healing work, you start to understand that your parents have wounded parts to, and that they could show up with you for you to the best of their ability based on

what they received. So now we're talking intergenerational. We're talking intergenerational patterns, beliefs, nervous systems. So you, you could have the best intent ever, but if you didn't heal your nervous system and your patterns, likely you're operating from what you received. And that's no one's fault. Absolutely no one's fault. And it's never too late to rupture and repair as a parent to do your own work. I find that when you do your own healing work, you start to show up differently for your children and allow your children to have these experiences. And even if they're blaming you a little right now, understand that's part of the process. Really moving out of blame is also part of the process. What I help individuals, and this is

like really kind of deep thinking, but we internalize our parents, whether we do the work with them like your son is doing this beautiful work with you in real time. Or we can't. Some people don't have the option to have parents that are willing to do the work with us for whatever reason. We can do the work with the internalized parent that we have inside our system. And we can also start to understand how they are the way they are and how they have younger regressed parts and they have wounded parts and they're operating to the best of their ability. And again, this comes later. This comes when we've healed a little bit more of what we've experienced. And we're starting to understand what our parents went through. Like I talk at the end of the book about my dad,

my dad's parents being Holocaust survivors. So I talk about how terror is passed through generations. And, you know, that's not my dad's fault, but he influenced my choices in men, you know, and I talk about his substance abuse and all of that. And now I have so much compassion that maybe he didn't get a chance to fully heal all that intergenerational trauma. He's way better now, but that, that terror and that trauma was passed down through him. And, and, you know, at my age, I'll tell you that my parents, it wasn't cool to heal. We didn't like their generation was built on avoidance and workaholism. And chances are, that's what got passed down for anyone who's in their thirties or forties right now. Like that's what they did

to survive so now we're so lucky that in our culture we are being supported to slow down to find practitioners that work with the body to understand these things and really heal and what you often have like with what your son is going through is that you have to heal your experience but then you have to start to understand the intergenerational experiences and it's a lot of work and i commend him for doing this work and i think it's freaking awesome that you're able to hold that space. And that I think provides an additional level of repair for him. Yeah. He has said that. And he says, just being able to talk to you about it and have you receive it, like makes me feel so much better. And the other day he was going through something and he

called me and wanted to talk it out. And because he has struggled so much emotionally through the years and he's someone that I really have to work on my codependency with constantly. Like he's someone who can really just, I get really triggered into codependency with him. And so I was starting to just, my stomach was starting to nod up. I was starting to feel helpless and hopeless and like, oh shit, he's going into depression again. And he is so attuned and intuitive and attuned to me. And I want to talk about that in a second, because I loved what you were talking about, how we internalize our parents' wounds, right? And can feel them and these mirror neurons, right? But he, he's so attuned to me that he started saying, okay, I'm feeling like

you want to get off the phone. He started to feel abandoned and God bless him that he said that. And I said, I'm not feeling like I want to get off the phone. I'm noticing that I have a knot in my stomach and I'm feeling really helpless and hopeless and scared. And I don't know what to say to you that will help. And then he said, okay, thank you for telling me that. And then he just started talking a little bit and he's like, you know what? I think all I need to know at times like this is just have you say, everything's going to be okay. I was like, okay, I can say that. Yeah. You know, I was thinking I needed to fix it or make you stop, you know, that was where my head, like my instincts were like, I got to, you know,

I started to get scared that you were spiraling or whatever and yeah, everything is going to be okay. It is. So it was this really beautiful moment where we both got a little bit triggered. I got triggered that triggered him. And then we were able to work it out in the moment. And you talk about that, that when, you know, when we start to heal, like you said, you can repair better. You can co-regulate. I think also your compass is better. Like we were talking about earlier, you're not as likely to be attracted and pulled into those old patterns. A hundred percent. And I mean, for those who are listening and who are repeating or attracting the same type, the, the point is to heal. So you evolve and you don't attract. And I love that example because I think

your son was noticing that you went, you shifted out of a ventral state and you shifted into a fear state and you disconnected and that, you know, his nervous system picked up your nervous system. And that's not codependency. That's how interconnected we are in life. And the number one thing we want from our parents and our friends and what I call anchors is we want them, we want to feel like we're together, like that we're, it's a we. And so he was just saying, mom, I just want to feel like you're with me right now. And the more that you can be with me and you couldn't, you checked out because you got scared, but it being able to label it brought you back in. And then the more that you guys can be a we, and I'm with you and I can recognize your experience,

the more that we can heal that experience. And it happens on such a subtle level. It is so subtle, but we know the second that someone checks out. Our whole system is constantly scanning our environment to say, are you with me or are you not with me? And so he could sense that you shifted into fear and he was like, you're not with me anymore. And he interpreted that as you want to get off the phone, but really you just shifted into a fear state. So these subtle senses of, are you with me? Are you not with me? Tie into our sense of safety. And I dive deep into that Cause that's like another whole topic that we could spend an hour on and they're so subtle and it's really important to start to recognize them.

And like you did with your son or your son did with you to start to communicate. Cause often it's just, I'm feeling abandoned right now because you're checked out and you're checked out because you're scared. And once we start to have some language around this, we can get back into connection faster. And that's how we're wired to stay in connection. Connection feels safe. Connection is what we all deeply desire. Yeah.

Beautiful. And the way that relationships develop, certainly love relationships, right? You're in that infatuation stage where everything feels perfect and you're meeting each other in all of these amazing ways. And then eventually something starts to change, right? Some circumstance comes in or something comes in to break that fantasy of perfection. And that is when we start to see these patterns emerge where you get into these repetitive fights or these wounds emerge.

And so I'm wondering if you can just speak to like, if that is happening, and I know you get into all of this in the book and people will read the book and learn a lot, but if you are in that, maybe in that newer phase of the relationship where you're starting to see some things surface, or maybe you've been in a relationship for ages and you're in those same repetitive patterns, what's the first step that you need to take to start shifting that? First step is to have compassion for yourself and to start to understand that your behaviors are usually automatic.

They're related to your nervous system. They're adaptive and brilliant, actually. And when you start to understand the root of them, you start to say, oh my God, thank God I responded this way. This is how I survived. Or no wonder I responded this way. And it does take time to change your automatic response. It is possible, but the first step is awareness. And the second step is to understand how did this pattern begin and let's go to the root. And then slowly over time, as we meet these things, our automatic response will change and our nervous system will start to be in safety longer.

But often, and this often happens when we find a safe person or we start to do the work, it doesn't feel like we're in safety. We actually are meeting all these things that have been stored. So it can feel a little like a roller coaster in the beginning. Pandora's box has been opened. Pandora, and I have clients that are like, can I go back? And I'm like, no, no. If we just keep going forward, you're going to see.

And then they're like, oh my God, like I can feel on some days I'm walking around with such a sense of inner security and safety, but I can't maintain it. And I'm like, because it doesn't just work like a light switch, right? Like we're expanding our window of tolerance. We're expanding these things inside and it takes time. But over time, we internalize the right relationships, right? Just as we would do as a baby. And we rebuild our sense of inner security.

And I am like, I wrote my first book thinking like I had it figured out. And can I be honest with you? I had so much more work to do. And not every day do I feel completely safe and free and liberated. but I do feel like I've internalized so much security at this point that my life feels so much more expansive. And it's, it's really hard to put into words. It doesn't mean I'm not vulnerable. It doesn't mean that I don't get activated. It doesn't mean that I don't have hard days. I can't really put it into words. It just means that I'm embodied and being embodied is

hard work, but that I'm for the most part, feeling very supported in the universe through my relationships in my inner and my outer world. And, and that comes through doing the work. So I'm happy I wrote the book and, and I didn't realize after the first book that I would have more work to do, but I'm very, very grateful for the work and anyone who can do the work. And I had to say, this does not have to be done with a therapist. And I make that point in the book because not everybody can afford a therapist, but it does need to be done with someone who has a sense of safety within their system and can be reliable, nonjudgmental and consistent for you. We do need people like that. So I really kind of unpack that because I really want this for

everyone. You give people a path to do this. And if they do want to find a therapist or a coach that can support them, where would you recommend finding that person? What's the best way to find someone who does that kind of work? I would say any therapist that does work with the body does some somatic work, an SE therapist or an attachment informed therapist. I have, you know, coaches on my team, but you know, you want to make sure that when you're sitting down with a therapist or a coach, that they're not trying to fix you or diagnose you. And they don't have an agenda that they allow from some natural unfolding and that they understand how trauma or how sensation in the body is very important to healing and that they have, and that you feel safe around them.

I remember, I mean, I felt safe around my therapist, but like, to be honest, the real work didn't surface for a couple of months because I had such so many protectors. I talk about protectors in the book, but I had so many things protecting me that it took me a while to slow down and really let her in, you know? So it's a little spiritual too. You know, I can't say that every therapist has the skills and some people like I've, I've had clients meet the right sponsor or have the right anchoring friend. And some people have a tremendous gift and capacity to be there. And so I think it's recognizing who has the capacity. It's bringing your emotional experience to people who actually can hold it and receive it and validate it. And I think once you experience

that once in one healthy relationship, I think your nervous system starts to recognize it and more and more, and then you start to attract more and more available people and you reorient to those people. But it's a process. And I think it's hard in our culture to find the right people. I'm just being honest. A lot of therapists just want to do CBD and give you a diagnosis and send you on the way and let's fix the current problem. And they don't really get to the heart. And then there's also so many exceptional therapists. So I think really looking for people who are somatically trained or understand how attachment lives in the body, like you clearly get it. And it's, it's finding people who have that capacity. Yeah, I think that's true. And you talk a lot in

the book about how you can do it with someone, whether it's a coach or therapist or not. And really important what, cause I think a lot of people don't know this, especially if you've never really been embodied or really registered what safety in the nervous system feels like you get into what that feels like, right? Cause I think that's step one is even recognizing what safety feels like and recognizing it when you feel it with someone. And then going from there, is there anything that I forgot to ask you that you think is important that we share before we No, I think, I mean, I think you, you know, addressed it perfectly and understanding that attachment is a very holistic layered thing. So if you're listening and you're like, I'm anxiously

attached or I'm avoidant, I really want you to understand that these patterns live in all of us and likely you have more than one. And I really help you explain that on a, on a deeper level than I think any other attachment book out there kind of goes. I think you do. And there's so many attachment books out there. In fact, we interviewed a while ago, but you can listen to the interview I did with Judy Ho, guys, if you want to hear more about like specific attachment styles. And that's helpful to understand. But I think what's really beautiful about Safe, about this book, is that it's going beyond that into whatever your style is. It's really about creating that safety inside yourself. And so thank you. Thank you so much for writing it and for the work you do in the world

and people can find you. Obviously they'll get the book, put a link there. Where else should they go to learn more about what you're up to? Yeah. I also, I'm giving away, I took a picture of it because my, uh, my project manager wants me to say this. So if you order and we're going to give you the link, there's like a blueprint that we're going to give. So beyond the labels, a deeper dive into healing attachment wounds. And I also have an interview with my mentor who's in her 80s, who's studied interpersonal neurobiology for like, I don't know how many years. Her and I have a live talk on what inner security feels like. And it's kind of like this very special live talk. So I'm going to give you that link for anyone who wants those extra freebies

of ordering the book. And yeah, I have a private practice called the Relationship Institute of Palm Beach. And then I have a coaching business called the Conscious Relationship Group. And you can find me on Instagram at Jessica Baum, L-M-H-C. And yeah, I just thank you for having me. Thank you for helping me get this information out into the world. Thank you for deeply understanding it yourself. That means a lot to me. Yeah. So I just really appreciate you and this conversation. Thank you. Thanks so much. Yeah. I get really annoyed when I go on a show and nobody has read the book, but I busted my butt. Right. It's like, why didn't you read a little bit of it? I always try. I always try to read the whole book. I think this book is, and it's such a deeply layered book.

I mean, it's, it's not like you sit down on a weekend and it's easy. It's a, it's a companion in this book. It's, it's something that, you know, I hope people hold and bring to their therapists and bring to their anchors and you really utilize it. So thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. I went to the doctor, said I'm crazy for your love. Wrote me a prescription, but there's no cure for crying.