The Wellness Scoop - How to cultivate healthy relationships, attachment theory and bone broth with Jessica Baum

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

I’m joined by psychotherapist, relationship expert, and author, Jessica Baum. Jessica’s work is focused on developing a meaningful connection with oneself and on understanding our own core patterns so that we can better understand how we relate in our relationships.  We discuss: How to identify the different attachment styles The link between childhood experiences and behavioural patterns in adulthood How to move towards a secure attachment style  Tools to regulate your nervous system  How to cultivate healthier relationships with others Why doing the inner work is as important as setting boundaries with others Each week I unpack a wellness trend with GP Gemma Newman. This week on Fact or Fad we’re looking at bone broth - is it a cure-all drink? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oh, hi there! I'm Norma, the unofficial mayor of the Town of Destiny. Speaking of, FanDuel's Kick of Destiny 3 is happening live Super Bowl Sunday. You should watch. It's gonna be a hoot! While you're at it, download FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on touchdowns, turnovers, heck, even total kicker points, don't you know? Anywho, enjoy your podcast or whatnot. Please play responsibly. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you, please go to connectsontario.ca.

Wellness. What on earth does it mean? And why would we need to unpack it? With over 58 million hashtags on Instagram, the topic has really never been more prominent. But, and there is a but here, three in five of us feel that wellness is incredibly confusing. We want to feel healthier, we want to feel happier, but we have no idea what's clickbait and what's genuinely health enhancing. Who's an expert and who's peddling absolute nonsense and look I am right here with you on this at times I've also found this world really hard to navigate. So welcome to Wellness Unpacked our new podcast hosted by me Ella Mills author entrepreneur and founder of Deliciously Ella. This series aims to do just as it states,

unpack the world of wellness with expert guests. These guests will be sharing with me and with you their three pieces of advice for a better life, to feel healthier and happier. This is a show and a conversation that's about progress it is not about perfection it's about helping you make small simple sustainable changes and within that I'm going to be testing out a different wellness trend every single week intermittent fasting celery juice, collagen, ketogenic diets, CBD, you name it, I'll try it. I'll then unpick the trend, separating fact from fad, with my friend and NHS GP, Dr Gemma Newman. And together we'll be equipping you with the tools that can genuinely make a difference to your life and well-being, and equally helping you potentially put to one side the trends that may make a little bit less difference.

Are you ready for episode nine? Our ninth guest on Wellness Unpacked is psychotherapist and author Jessica Baum. This episode is all about relationships and there is so much to unpack I reckon this could have been three or four hours long it's not don't worry but Jessica's work and her three piece of advice focus on attachment theory a concept that I'm sure lots of you have come across before and it's something I'm definitely trying to get my head around. Attachment theory is basically the theory that the relationship we have with our primary caregivers as children, normally our mums and dads, deeply affects our interpersonal relationships as adults and therefore has a massive impact on our well-being. In this episode Jessica and I discuss

how we can improve both our relationship with ourselves and those around us. I cannot wait for you to hear this one. Hi Jessica and welcome to Wellness Unpacked. It is such a pleasure to have you here. Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. So we kickstart every single episode with the same question just to get a better sense of you and your take on the wellness industry in that space. Could you tell our listeners what wellness means to you? I mean, wellness has like a big meaning for me. I feel like there's so many people out there looking for wellness in all the wrong places. And it's such a big industry targeting so many people to get healthy this way or take this pill or do this. And, you know, wellness for me,

because I'm a psychotherapist, it's about being with more and more of yourself. It's not always about fancy spa trips and, you know, protocol like that. It's more about being with parts of yourself and being more embodied. And wellness is sometimes messy and healing and layered, and it's not all glitz and glam. So wellness for me is really about being with more of yourself in the support of others and feeling really authentic inside yourself and not necessarily having to do anything but that. I think that is such a brilliant answer.

I certainly feel, and just be interested in your take on this, that as the word wellness and this whole industry has kind of exploded in the last decade, it's become quite an external pursuit. You know, we're continuously looking outside of ourselves for some kind of magic answer that will solve all our kind of physical, mental challenges to some extent. I don't mean to be too generalized with it, but I think there is an element of that. You know, you can have a supplement for this or a very expensive powder that will solve the next thing. And as a result, we're kind of externalizing the solution potentially a little bit too much. It sounds like that's your view on it as well.

Yeah, exactly. You put it in really good words and I'm not knocking, you know, things that can help support us. I just think that we think the solution is outside of us when really it's about being more with what's going on inside of us. And just think that we think the solution is outside of us when really it's about being more with what's going on inside of us. And so those things are wonderful and can help support. But often I see people try different things over and over and really what wellness or health they

need is really tending to their inner world differently. I know it feels sometimes like we're just putting a plaster on almost by taking a pill and hoping that might be the answer and it's very interesting this conversation is coming right after we spoke to Dan Buechner who's been studying the blue zones around the world and the people who live the longest the healthiest and a huge part of his work was talking about relationships and communities and our social constructs and how important that was to our total well-being. So it feels so apt to be now having this conversation with you about healthy relationships and how we foster that. And a lot of the conversation around those relationships

stems to attachment styles, which obviously forms the premise of your work. And it might be something that our listeners have heard about before or come across. Could you tell us a little bit about those styles and the theory around attachment theory and the impact that that has on all of us? Sure. Yeah. Attachment theory is being thrown out a lot and people are becoming a lot more aware, which is really great. And it's not just a theory, it's a science. And that's so important. So it was developed in 1950 by John Boble and Mary Ainsworth, two psychotherapists or psychologists that really, really studied infant connection with primary caregiver. And throughout the 1950s till today, the science is so accurate, almost like 80 to 90% accurate

that we can determine your attachment style from your earliest interactions and co-regulations and felt sense of safety and connection in your home and how we connect and attach and adapt lives inside our body. It lives inside our nervous system and we are always attaching. So when we attach later on life to our romantic partner, our adaptations, the story we tell ourselves, our nervous system responses all get reenacted in our romantic relationship. So it's fascinating. People really want to learn about why their behaviors are the way they are, why they keep picking partners that show up a certain way.

It has a lot to do with early embedded patterns in your nervous system. And so this science has really helped so many people better understand themselves, how to heal themselves, understand what they need in a relationship and grow. And yeah, it's working with those embedded patterns and being more compassionate when your nervous system is having a fear or response to something that is scary in your intimate bonds. It makes a huge amount of sense. I remember the first time that I learned about attachment theory and the different styles around it. And I started to understand self-diagnosis, to be honest honest but started to understand where I felt I fitted on that scale and it suddenly made a huge amount of sense about why I would maybe see things in

certain ways or had worries in relationships that maybe weren't kind of totally rational but it all made a huge amount of sense as I got into it and I'm sure there's a lot of people listening thinking oh what are the styles what am I could you give us a little bit of an overview of those different attachment styles? Sure. So there are typically four styles and I like to think of them as patterns and they have belief systems attached to them. They're secure. So a bulk of the population, about 50% make up secure. And it doesn't mean a secure person can't be anxious or one of the population, about 50% make up secure. And it doesn't mean a secure person can't be anxious or one of the other styles because attachment is a combination of two people's systems and embedded patterns coming together. But a bulk of the population is secure.

I actually think we're moving away from that a little bit. But a secure person has inherent trust that their needs are going to get met. They don't feel violated when someone comes close. They don't fear abandonment when someone needs space. They have flexible boundaries. And they can manage, their nervous system can manage more in a relationship. They don't shift into a protective state as easily. Then there's anxious attachment, which is what I wrote my book on. And these are individuals who had inconsistency in their primary caregiver and their experience. And I think the inconsistency

is probably their word. So they might get into connection, but their amygdala, which is in the middle of their brain, is primed for abandonment. So their experience of connection is sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't. So they typically fall more in what society calls the codependent type of person where they self-abandon and they contract the body of another. They can be very sensitive and empathic and they usually know what their loved one is feeling, but they struggle with inner connection with self because in order to survive, they kind of had to adapt this way. So I can talk a lot more about anxious attachment. I think it's a growing population. But then there's avoidant, and there's two types of avoidant. There's fearful avoidant

and dismissive avoidant. But I really look at avoidant as someone who shuts down their energy, and sometimes they think they're better off alone. And so they can be more independent, which is born out of a survival state. And they don't trust that their inherent needs will get met at all. So they have a struggle with vulnerability in a relationship. They struggle with space. They usually need a lot of space and independence and freedom. So you have different patterns in how you attach to your romantic partner. And when the core wounds show up, your patterns will show up and often anxious and avoidant are very much drawn to each other. And I really doubled down on that in my book because it can be a miserable cycle you're stuck in unless you really understand the patterns

and the nervous system responses, and you start to look at what's happening in your relationship differently. So a lot of anxious people feel like they're going to be left and they're not good enough, they're not lovable. And avoidant people feel the same thing, but the way they respond is they become more independent. And so one person is reaching for connection out of fear and the other person is pulling away out of fear. So you have a pattern that can be pretty painful. That makes a lot of sense. And Jessica, what kind of parenting influences these different styles? That's such a great question because I'm sure your listeners are thinking, you know, great parents and all these things. It's so much more about the state,

their nervous system state and the attunement that the parent is able to offer the baby. So if your mother, for example, was more anxious, even if she showed up the best that she could, but she was in a little bit more fight flight mode or anxious, or she was going through something, the baby is a sensing being so that we're pulling in and we're developing and we're sensing, okay, our parent isn't calm, isn't attuning, isn't seeing into us. They're just in survival mode. So for someone who is more anxious, their parent might've been inconsistent. So sometimes they

could attune and sometimes they couldn't. So that's where that inconsistency. For a true avoidant, the parent is not as attuned to the emotional needs of the baby. They will meet all the physical needs. They will do homework with the child. They will focus on accomplishments, but their emotional IQ around inner seeing the child isn't as high. And so that child learns to relate by doing rather than sensing. And so we're passing on this information and our brain development as actually mirroring our primary caregiver's brain development. So if they're more in the right hemisphere and they're able to attune more because we're connecting right hemisphere to right hemisphere, we're going to sense that energetic connection and that dance. We call it co-regulation and

attunement. And if your parent is more in a survival state, then that baby is going to pick up on that through eyes or tense or tone and rupture and repair, which I won't talk about a lot, but it's not about having perfect parents. Actually, they only have to be kind of perfect 66% of the time. I think that's the statistics. It's that the baby starts to form inherent trust that my needs are going to get met. And so enough of their needs need to get met and be attuned to that they inform this inherent trust. If there's inconsistency, the anxious person learns that connection will be dropped.

I will be abandoned. If there's not a lot of emotional attunement, the baby learns I'm not going to get my needs really met. So that's all happening on a felt sense. It's not actually in consciousness in the baby. So again, these patterns are developed through what our parents are going through. And our parents are usually going through a lot. And, um, you know, and if they don't have the proper support because no one person is supposed to raise a child, it's actually a village, it's aunts, it's uncles. If they don't have the proper support, I know my mom was going through postpartum depression. She was going through separation. She was going through a lot of stress herself. And so she was doing the best she can. And yet that impacted me and my wiring a certain way. So we have to have a lot of compassion for parents too, because they're not trying to

hardwire anxious or avoidant states. They're literally doing the best they can and they can't help it if they're in a survival state or not. So this is how it gets passed down intergenerationally. And what kind of ages are we talking about when you say baby? So from womb, we have a pregnancy tone that the baby is picking up. We can store what we call implicit memory from womb. To about four, we're right hemisphere to right hemisphere. So we're sensing beings and we're relating to the world through our senses and

through tone and environment. We don't have that ego state of the left gets born a little bit later. So really when we're coming out, we're really just sensing our world. So if a parent is scared, even if they're not acting scared, but their system is scared, a baby is going to understand that in a much deeper way, that I might not get my needs met because my parent is scared or they're anxious or they're detached. And who out there does perfect parenting? That's also a problem. all different kinds of things and most of the time doing the best they can. And yet their system, their nervous system, the way they respond to us impacts us and really influences the foundation of our nervous system and even all our organs. And so later on in life, we can kind of sense, oh, I have an abandonment wound or I have a wound of feeling suffocated or engulfed. And a lot of that might've been from early, early interactions that our parents just were doing the best they can. And we feel fear

when certain situations come up. So as a parent, I guess it's absolutely critical to implement tools in your life to start to regulate your emotions as much as it's humanly possible. Of course, as you said, life, it's very challenging, but if we're able to kind of tap into our parasympathetic states and create that sense of kind of calm as much as is plausible in our own lives, that will be a helpful way of trying to transfer that over. Yeah. I mean, you can't help it when your system shifts, right? So it's automatic, but I would say as a parent to the best of your ability to eliminate stressors that you don't need and really to assess, you know, how can I reframe things? How can I pull in support? Because we're

not supposed to raise a baby on our own or mothers or aunts or uncles, safe people are supposed to help. So having the support and I would say the best thing you can do is eliminate any stress in your life if possible. I mean, there's regular stress that we can't help. Whatever it is you can do and that will look different for everyone. Maybe it's self-care. Maybe it's getting to yoga and having someone watch your child. Whatever it is, if you can try to reframe

your world to be less stressful and reach out for support and know that that's normal and reduce your stress levels, that would be great for your connection, your ability to be calm and connect with your baby. And Jessica, presumably that's not just for your baby, but all the relationships around you. Yeah, I mean, for sure. And I think that's doing some of your own inner work because I, again, I think what cues us into stress might not even be rational. And so bringing awareness to what is really happening in the here and now and what is really embedded trauma or a fear state that's not actually fitting the appropriate environment. So that's where healing and doing your own inner work is paramount. But yeah, I think we live in a society that used to,

I don't think so anymore. I think the message is changing, but we used to value being busy and being productive. And that only hurt us. It set us into a sympathetic state of, I have to be busy. If I'm busy, I'm important. And the truth is healing and showing up for your child and showing up for your friends actually means slowing down and being more present with what's going on inside of you and getting the support that you need. And if you're just really busy, that's just a state of protection. It's not a state of embodiment. We're all wanting to be embodied. Being more embodied means being with more and more of yourself. And you've been avoiding that for

good reason. You want to slow down and pull in the support and really start to be with what's surfacing when you slow down. And do you find it's that thing? So say you start to understand your attachment style and you realize you are more drawn, let's you start to understand your attachment style and you realize you are more drawn let's say to the anxious attachment style and you start to understand therefore why you might be having certain thought patterns say in your relationship as you said this nervousness that someone's going to abandon you say do you find that as people start to recognize that they're able to better ask their needs to be met in their relationship and maybe take a step back and just de-escalate conflict or challenges because they're more in connection with what they truly need themselves or what they're truly insecure about, which perhaps they weren't realizing exactly what that was beforehand? Yeah, I think that the first step is awareness. And I think when you can bring

awareness to your patterns and your behavior, you can bring some compassion to how you adapt it. And you can start to ask for your needs more. Someone who's anxious, the developmental link that's missing is self-regulation. So they can't always self-soothe because they didn't get... So when we're born, we're born with a sympathetic state, but we're not born with a fully developed parasympathetic state, which is our rest and digest. Our primary caregiver is a stand-in for that. And if our primary caregiver was going through their own stress responses or they weren't available, an anxious person usually can't self-regulate that easily. They actually need to call a safe friend.

They need another person's nervous system to help regulate their nervous system. And it's not their fault. But I think starting to understand that and they can become dependent on people. And it's through healthy dependency and support that you learn self-regulation. It's not something that you just learn on your own. So I think that, you know, when you start to really understand, you know, maybe I have anxious attachment, it's not that the healing happens in the understanding. That's like the beginning of it. The beginning is self-awareness. And I think with the right support, then healing can happen.

When you start to hold these anxious parts, it's never about eliminating them. So I'm sure other people listening are exactly the same. I'm certainly sitting here nodding, thinking 100% sit in that anxious category through and through. And I can imagine it becomes incredibly easy to hear all of this, to read this and think that's absolutely me, that resonates so deeply. And to find that so incredibly helpful in terms of thinking about how you build your relationships and how you create those tools for regulation in your life. But your first piece of advice is that whilst these labels are incredibly helpful, they can also limit the full picture and that we

shouldn't define ourselves by that. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, I love that question because I see the labels and listen, my book Anxiously Attached is a label. They're embedded patterns and it's not black and white. So you can fit into a label and you have a default that you might recognize, but we embed many patterns. I like to think, I do, I've been taught that attachment is a wheel. So you can fit on the wheel and who you attach with moves you around the wheel. So it's hard because I think people are excited to, you know, identify what their attachment style is. And while having

a diagnosis or a label is really important when you're looking at mental health or the medical field, you don't want to get stuck on the label. Because at the end of the day, these are really adaptations that your nervous system has brilliantly done to survive. And you can be anxiously attached and have an avoidant protector. It's just so layered. And I caution people to be really careful with over-identifying with that label, to have a more holistic view, to understand that they attached differently to different people throughout their lives and to pull on those different experiences. Because I think we can get lost in the label and the label can be shaming

and the label's also weaponized a lot too. You know, I see avoidant people taking the brunt of a lot because they're seen as cold and aloof and detached. And the truth is they are longing for connection as well. And the way in which they show up really makes it easy to be like, oh, they don't care. And they do care, but that's their protective state. Just like an anxious person might overcare and expand their energy, an avoidant person might turn their back and kind of disappear in their energy. But I think I see a lot of people being hard on avoidant people and they're truly suffering as well.

And they're longing for connection as well. And it's actually harder to heal because anxious people have a natural inclination to reach out for support. They'll actually ask for help even sometimes when they don't need it. Where avoidant people are terrified to be vulnerable and ask for help and learning to trust that their needs are going to get met, it's actually a hard road on that side as well. So I talk about both in my book and compassion being built on both ends and understanding it not just from the label, but again, on the developmental side and the nervous system side, so that we can have more compassionate and intelligent conversations in our partnerships. And is it something, and I don't want to be oversimplistic in this,

and I appreciate everyone's going to exist on a continuum in terms of kind of how embedded behaviors are and how challenging emotional complications may have been within people's lives. But is it something where in a kind of ideal world, as we start to unpack where we sit on the various different elements of these four styles, we would all benefit from starting to move towards more secure attachment. And is that possible? Absolutely. And, you know, I talk about earned attachment, earned security and due to neuroplasticity. So our brain, and we know this due to research, is that our brain is always changing. And we used to think that at a certain age, our brain stops, but that's simply not true

we're always adapting we're always evolving and there's neuroplasticity going on so we can rewire the brain at any time what what i like to say in terms of well first i'll say that we're as humans we're always reaching out for warm secure. And if your nervous system isn't used to that, be around that more and more because the more that you're around warm people who are kind and nonjudgmental, the more you experience that, the more your body starts to recognize safety.

And the more you recognize safety inside your body, the more we're designed to move towards safety. So if that's something, you know, sometimes your body is used to chaos and that's what's familiar. So you'll gravitate towards chaos and especially you'll pick partners that might consciously or unconsciously

recreate that chaos. But, you know, as human beings, we are so resilient and we will, if we're exposed to warm, nonjudgmental, safe people, over time, our system will gravitate towards that. And so in the presence of that, we start to change. And that's, you know, if you want to change your attachment system, it's about picking reliable people to do the work with. And I always say with neuroplasticity and rewiring your brain, it'd be like,

if Ella lived across the street, if you lived across the street and there was snow on the ground and anxiety was a well-worn path for me, I had shoveled that path from my house to your house a thousand times, maybe a hundred million times, who knows? When I feel anxious, I take that path. I have to shovel new pathways. So it's not that change is hard or gets harder when we get older. It's that we have a well-worn pathway. And as we start to heal, we have to create new pathways. And on good days, when I'm less anxious or less cued, I might take the new pathways. I might build the space to understand I have to shovel these new pathways. And on really hard days, I might take the old pathway, right? So change happens over time when we start to develop dual awareness and an ability to create

new pathways. And that takes space in our brain. And I also think when you're talking about gaining earned security, this is a pretty big concept. we take in the essence of our primary caregivers. So if we took in an essence, like my mom was a little bit anxious, so I took in her anxious essence. We can take in the essence of anyone at any time. I refer this to inner community in my book. But if you have a safe, nonjudgmental friend, if you have an aunt, if you have a parent, a teacher, a dog, the energy of someone who's really warm and consistent, we start to internal resource that too. So the felt sense of, I am really loved by this person, becomes internalized. But when we're not around them, we can imagine being near them and it will release the same chemical reaction

inside our body. So when we're going through really hard experiences, we can resource secure people in that moment, or we can pick up the phone and call secure people and co-regulate with them. But those two things start to bridge the harder moments because we're now pulling in the felt sense of security, warmth, nonjudgmental when we're feeling abandoned or alone or scared. And again, it's such an experience that some people might be listening and be like, what is she talking about? And then other people will be like, oh yeah, when I think of my aunt or I think of my grandmother. I mean, for me, it's my grandmother. I can feel

like just the love that she had for me and I can resource that at any time. And I presume, Jessica, with this, that it's something that rewiring your brain and forming these new pathways, as you were saying, like shoveling the snow, is something that takes months, if not years, if not decades, for your default to switch. So it will probably feel a little bit harder and you have to be much more mindful, much more conscious, as you said, of coming back to those people and those patterns. But over time, the paths become easier to find. Yeah, I think that that's a good point. It does take a while. The research says that if you're married to someone who's more secure or you have more secure people really in your life, a good five years for the default to change.

But what I will say is that when people are in the midst of the work and they're forming dual awareness, and what I mean by that is they're in an activated state or they're in a survival state and they're now aware of their nervous system and their survival state. Even if they can't change the behavior, the awareness alone creates a shift internally. So while you're in the middle of the work, even though, yes, it takes time to really change these patterns, you actually become aware that you're in the middle of the work. And it's pretty cool because you're like, wow, I was in a really regressed place and my abandonment came up and I was able to think about my therapist or think about my best friend or think about my grandmother. And somehow I was able to hold one felt experience with another felt experience at the same time. And I felt a little bit of an expansion or, you know, I wanted to react to my partner and anger and, you know,

fire off on them. But I didn't because I knew I was in an activated state and I was able to pull away and practice ways to get my nervous system back into a ventral state. Or I wanted to shut down and I was at least aware that I'm shutting down and it's not my partner's fault. And this is what's going on in my nervous system. And this is how I adapted. So I think even the awareness around this stuff starts to create the first layer of change and it changes the language in which you communicate in your relationships and with yourself because now you understand things deeper and you usually form a little bit more self-compassion and compassion for your partner and their behaviors. And if you are wanting to change these patterns

and these behaviors for people people listening, they're going to be thinking, okay, I need to go and spend more time around that person because they really inspire me. But are there tools, you know, does mindfulness practices or like a breath work or anything that gets you more into your body, you know, does that help you with this change in this regulation? Yeah, I think, yes, being more embodied does help, but the nervous system responses are automatic. So if you become disembodied, it's not about always getting yourself back. I mean, so there's ways you can get yourself back, but it's also about building compassion for, wow, this is the state I'm in now. I was a little bit in a shutdown state and I could feel my energy kind of closing. And instead of like going for a walk or going to yoga, I actually was compassionate with that's where I was right now. I don't necessarily need to always change it. I also don't need to make decisions based on it. Our thoughts are so much slower and not accurate to what our body is feeling.

And so it's important to kind of notice that and, you know, realize, oh, I'm in a shutdown state. I will cycle out of this. I don't need to quit this or, you know, make a change in my life based on my state because we cycle through a lot of states. But your question was like, are there things we can do? When you're in like an automatic nervous system response, really your respiratory system is the only system that you have control over. And I know this sounds like pretty cliche coming from a psychotherapist, but your body is preparing for fight, flight, freeze, fawn. And so when you recognize that you're in that state,

if you can get out of the story and into extending your exhales, because it's the diaphragm and it's the exhales that will send a message back up to your brain, which is much slower than the signals coming from your body, that there is no bear or you're activated right now, but this situation is not actually really scary. So you can trick your brain back into a state of safety by just extending your exhales and letting the body tell it that we're not actually in a dangerous situation right now. And I think that's really helpful when you're in an argument with your partner and you know that you're really in sympathetic activation. If you can pull yourself away and get out of the story, because the story wants to pour more gasoline onto whatever it is that you're feeling. And say, wow, I'm really activated.

It would feel really good to go off right now. Or I feel really right in how I feel, because you do, right? And there's many layers to that. But I know that that's not going to help my relationship. And on a good day, I can pull myself away and work on cooling myself down by extending my exhales, maybe some breathing techniques, remembering that we're team us in our relationship and come back to a place of explaining that what got touched in me or what's going on

in me, because that's how another person might come back into connection with you. If you come at them in sympathetic, chances are you're going to trigger their sympathetic because our nervous systems are connected. But if you can manage to get your nervous system back into a place of calm and out of those defensive thinking patterns and come back from that place,

chances are you're going to get back into connection with your partner faster. I don't know if that answers your question or not, but. No, it absolutely does. It really does. And again, it just comes back to those simple tools, like, you know, breathing to really dispel a situation. And I guess that's such a segue actually to your second piece of advice. And you did say this earlier on and it really resonated, which is that connection is a biological imperative. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, that really comes from Dr. Stephen Porges' work and really understanding the

nervous system and how we've evolved. And so we've evolved in such amazing ways. And there's something called the vagus nerve that runs through our body. And we have something called the ventral state where I'm sitting here and looking at you. We're calm. We're exchanging energy. We feel really safe. We're expansive. We can access different parts of intuition while we're talking. This is a state that came through evolution. Now we have inner and outer cues and Stephen Porges talks about neuroception that can send us into a state of sympathetic activation.

So I could be sitting here with you and someone could run through the door and scare me, and I'm going to shift out of this calm place of trust and ease to a place of, you know, fight or flight or freeze, which we need. We need to shift if danger is really coming or we might even shut down and freeze as a dorsal response but the problem is these cues sometimes are just little cues and they're not actually dangerous but our system is remembering them as dangerous and a good example is let's say you're there with your husband or your boyfriend and you have a more anxious style and they pick up their phone all the time and they're constantly distracted or they're not present with you or they roll their eyes at you or sigh because tone, eye contact.

All of a sudden you could be feeling safe and you shift into a place of fight or flight or this person's not really with me. I don't feel connected in this moment. And then you have a story attached to that. You're actually shifting out of connection into a place of fight or flight and little internal cues. So thoughts or different things that come up inside or external cues can shift your system out of safety into a form of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

Fawn is people pleasing. That's actually people pleasing. Self-abandonment is a form of protection. So, you know, we want to stay in connection. And what brings you in and out of connection is different than what brings me in and out. So we want to become aware of, okay, I was feeling calm and connected. And when they roll their eyes in a millisecond, our system might think this person doesn't care about me.

I mean, and it happens so fast. Neuroception happens so fast. I have a funny story. So I'm anxiously attached for sure. And I've worked towards earned security, really hard work towards it. And my husband, he gets up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.

And so my neuroception and my scanning for abandonment is happening on a subconscious level, even while I'm sleeping. I'll spring out of bed and I'll go, honey, where are you going? And he looks at me and he goes, I'm just going to the bathroom. I'll be right back. So I can laugh at myself and we can kind of see how we're wired. So there's a part of my psyche that's scared that I'm still going to get left. And that part is on in the middle of the night. And I'm not even fully conscious in that moment, but I know when he gets up out of bed, my system recognizes that. And that's how subtle and fast and powerful our neuroception is. Yeah. No, I'm sure a huge number of people can relate to that. And thank you for sharing that vulnerability. I mean, certainly I'm exactly the same. And I remember it took me so long to realize,

I don't think I'd realized that part of myself for such a long time. And I remember my husband would say, oh, I just need to talk to you quickly. And we work together as well. So we say that to each other a lot. And it can be something as simple as like, oh, there's no ink in the printer. It can really be something of like total insignificance. But even now, my heart stops beating for a quick second. And I'm sure he's going to say

I'm getting divorced it's extraordinary he has never done a thing to make me think that but that's I'm so hardwired to think that that even if there's yes you said the slightest tone of something or something's not entirely clear what it means I go to that in a second and it's so interesting to start to recognize that but also I And it's so interesting to start to recognize that. But also, I think it's so important as you're sharing your story to normalize that, because I think this is all part of the conversational mental health, isn't it? That it's so easy to think, oh, I'm strange. Oh, there's something wrong with me. Oh, why do I have these anxious thoughts? And actually, as you start to get into your work, coming back to that word compassion,

you can have real self-compassion of, well, this is why I'm wired this way, and this is what I can do about it. And I think that's probably helpful both for all of us personally, but also in our relationships as well to strengthen them. Yeah, no, I think self-compassion is the beginning stages of healing. And when you start to look at yourself that way, that's when you actually start to look at your partner in a new way because they have wounded parts and struggle in their own ways. And then you both are out of the wounding. You're more of the observer at times and you can hold more space for each other. parts is and starting to tend to them and hold them is what an anxious person's work is. And surrounding yourself with people who can stay consistent for you definitely helps within reason.

And it sounds like you're, you know, I had similar experiences, you know, anybody who's like, I need to talk to you. I'm like, can you say, I need to talk to you about a client? I need to talk to you about this. Like, can you preface because I need to talk to you, my system might like assume the worst. And that's another thing that anxious people do, because we are primed for abandonment. So we're primed for like, what is what's going to happen? We don't know, there's not a felt sense of safety that's always there. So knowing that and communicating that and usually your partners can adjust accordingly to that. And I guess that leads me on really nicely, I think, to your third piece of advice in terms of thinking about how we relate to others, which is that you can't make another person heal or another person change. And I think that's incredibly important advice.

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email Bob at Libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com. That one touches home for me because, I mean, when you ask me some of those questions, I think a lot of people come to me for transformational experiences.

And I feel really close to my clients and I walk through a lot of change with them. And it's amazing, you know, after so many years to see people really transform and change and grow through this process. But then I think people in my personal life or my friends or family or close ones, when I see them struggling and my clinician is like, oh my God, this is so obvious. They don't want to look at this or this is too painful. It can be really hard to watch that on the outside. And I think people change when they're ready to change. And there's something spiritual about that. People come and seek help when there's enough safety in their system to recognize that this is where they are in their life and they're ready for help. And then other people are simply not ready. And so I've had to learn to really let go and

let people be in their process into my personal life, which is hard, but I think it's a good message, especially if you're in a relationship and you're really trying to get the other person to change. Sometimes it's best to let go and really work on healing yourself and in healing yourself. And that's part of why I wrote the book for singles and couples. You're going to change the dynamics of things. But if you're always trying to get someone else to see the truth or someone else to change, it can be exhausting. And transformation comes when we really let go of that for them and for us. tricky one but I wonder it's also just personal curiosity with this which is that I know for me I've certainly changed a lot over the last 10 years or so I would say I don't know exactly which of the three styles of attachment I would have sat into but it certainly was not secure 100% can testify to that but I think my partner certainly has the most extraordinarily secure

attachment and spending time with him and his family over the last seven years or so has been a really transformative experience. And I found it really difficult, really challenging, actually, to start with in lots of ways. It was quite almost triggering to see the way they interacted sometimes and the way that he would react to a situation which was not to because he doesn't have those deep-rooted fears and anxieties in the same way that I certainly do but as I've unpacked my own patterns it's become really clear to me patterns and other people and some relationships that I had formed which I think were in the trenches of feeling anxious and feeling

insecure and feeling unhappy in my own life. And it's like those kind of two unhappy souls can see each other. These aren't romantic relationships, it's very close friendships. And as I've changed and evolved and kind of, yeah, really got to know myself and really worked on that, I've really seen that those felt incredibly unhealthy in my life and were kind of pulling me back to a place where I really didn't want to be. And I just wonder for people listening, for me, that was a friendship versus a family relationship or a romantic relationship. But I'm sure a lot of people listening who are interested in this topic have done probably some work on themselves and have maybe had experiences experiences like that how do you start to understand how to navigate those people in your life that's a beautiful question and it's like one of those and buts

questions because when we're in close bonds with others sometimes they're not healthy for us and sometimes they're touching or awakening parts of us that existed before. And it's an opportunity to heal what is coming to the surface and perhaps put boundaries in place. But, you know, healing doesn't mean that I only am around secure people. Healing means that when I'm around someone who activates me or touches something deep inside of me, I get really curious about what's going on for me and what links this, you know, to themes or core wounds in my life. And I start to tend to my inner world when that gets touched. And that might result in a boundary in my external world. But it's not about avoiding those relationships all

the time or ever. Sometimes it's not about avoiding them. But yeah, assessing because there's no one answer to this, but assessing what is getting touched in me? What do I need to say to this person that's coming up for me? And it can be about boundaries at that point, if you feel like the interaction is not serving you. But I think more importantly, is something's really coming up inside you, instead of making it about the other person, first making it about what is this going on for me, and then kind of operating from that place. Because I think eliminating relationships happen all the time, because we're uncomfortable. But sometimes we need to really unpack that uncomfortability to decide, is it the relationship or is it just

something old kind of lighting up inside of me? And can I see that in a different way? But I think the inner reflection before the elimination process, because I see so many people kind of just eliminate or discard. And, and while you might need to set boundaries, it's, it's stopping you from the internal lesson that that person is touching inside of you. So both are true, if that makes sense. Oh, it makes so much sense. And I think it really actually emphasizes that third piece of advice, which is that you can't change other people. You can't heal other people, but you, you can do that for yourself. And if you can do that for yourself, it's going to help you

relate better to the people who would love to change, but they're just not at that moment in their life right now. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, you might, you might have to set boundaries and separate yourself, or you might do the changing and come at it from like, this is what's coming up for me. And, you know, I want to set a boundary or you don't say that, but like, this is what I need from you. And the relationship might change for the better too. So, you know, as you change the system changes, so you get to decide, is this a system or a relational space that I still want to be in? But the more you do your own work, the overall energy of the

relationship will shift as well. And so there's an opportunity to say, will this person grow with me? Can they kind of meet my needs or understand my boundaries? Or is this something that's not serving me? Yeah, no, it's such good advice. And I'm sure something that everybody listening can relate to because relationships are complicated because we're all complicated beings. And I'm sure something that everybody listening can relate to because relationships are complicated because we're all complicated beings. And I think it's so important to look at it in the way you're doing, which is incredibly nuanced. I think that's so important to not oversimplify this. But, Jessica, honestly, I can't thank you enough. I could honestly keep you here for hours and hours and hours and go into my full therapy session, but we won't do that.

But, yeah, just a massive thank you. It's been really illuminating and just so appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you as well. I absolutely love this idea that Jessica gets across that we have this neural plasticity and we can really choose who we want to be. And I think that's such a core theme to everything we're talking about on this show this idea that whilst it's not easy we can shift our destiny for want of a better word and I think she really touched on that so brilliantly it is now time for fact or fad where as you know every week Dr Gemma Newman and I put to the test all sorts of wellness trends and this week it is

bone broth. Drinking bone broth supposedly helps with immune function and even anti-aging. I'm going to be honest I'm not sure how I feel about this one but is it a fact? Is it a fad? Let's find out what Gemma thinks. So this is a bit of a funny trend, I think, for us to be looking at because we're both plant-based and we're looking at bone broth. And I have to say, I was saying this to you earlier, it's funny because I'm really flexible. I really don't believe in a dogmatic approach. Most things don't bother me at all.

But the idea of boiling up a carcass really freaks me out. But let's park that let's get into the trend what's the deal bone broth yes so bone broth has been popular in years gone by and it's been eaten for centuries in various cultures probably because it's easier to digest than an actual raw animal carcass and it also is believed to have some healing properties. And it's a bit like with those kind of old wives tales or that comfort that you might get from your grandmother's chicken soup. People swear by it as a flu remedy. And in reality, we don't actually have a great deal of data to support that it is necessarily any better for

health than eating a healthy and varied diet. But people have used it for a very long time, and I guess for good reason. That is very interesting. And in terms of why it might be good for your gut health or your immune system, why could that be? Is that also because there's other ingredients often in it, like ginger and garlic? No, you're right. There are things in bone broth that could potentially be helpful. So there are studies on individual constituents like chondroitin or glucosamine or glycine, glutamine, proline, hyaluronic acid. And those are all things that would be released from the bones into the broth yes potentially but in so many different sort of variations in terms of the concentration so the

way it's made is you basically have to boil the bones for a variable amount of time to sort of release these things but you don't know in sort of supermarket bought bone broth or even in homemade bone broth you don't really know exactly where the meat and the bones have come from and how long you should cook it for optimal sort of ingredients so it's quite hard to actually quantify and again the sort of heavy metal content may be a problem. One small study found that bone broth made from chicken bones contained three times the lead of chicken broth that was made with chicken meat only. And then a different study found that both homemade and commercially produced bone broth contained quite low levels of calcium and magnesium, which is what you would hope might be released from the bone, as well as heavy metals like lead and cadmium.

Now, although the studies show they are low levels, they're really low levels, you don't really want to be consuming that on a regular basis. It's not great for children to be exposed even to a small amount of lead. So it's just not something that I feel I can freely suggest, yeah, just go for it. Potentially, you could get more of those health benefits, the protein, the calcium, the anti-inflammatory type ingredients from just other sources. So yeah, you're right. I think the ingredients within bone broth are readily available from other places. And, you know, if you're looking for protein rich foods, you can get protein obviously from animal foods like

chicken or egg or beef or fish. But I tend to prefer plant well for good sort of skin health and joint health and bone health. You can get from flax seeds and chia seeds and hemp seeds, leafy greens for vitamin C because we know vitamin C is great for enhancing your natural production of collagen. So you've got things like kiwis and bell peppers and things like that. And of course, you know, if you're worried about your skin, then wearing sunscreen is another great way of, you know, maintaining the collagen that you have. So yeah, there's a number of things you can do. And of course, having a very plant rich diet is going to give you lots

of other ingredients that will help you to maintain all of your not only collagen but also protein content of your diet and just thinking about it as well especially at the moment making a bone broth it's quite expensive um because obviously you need you need that kind of whole animal um whereas if you wanted to make like a simple say veggie minestrone and you could have some gorgeous cavolo nero coming into season in there you couldie minestrone and you could have some gorgeous cavolo nero coming into season in there you could have chickpeas and you could have as you said bell peppers and all those ingredients that are so good for us and it could be made in half an hour and it would be really quite inexpensive to make um yeah but it sounds like it would give you a

huge amount of the same benefits exactly and it's less time consuming as well. You do have to spend quite a long time boiling the bones and you have to have all those spare products at home. And as I said, if you're really interested in adding additional protein or additional goodness into your diet, you can get it from many other places so yeah if you want to try it you can but I would be aware of that potential for heavy metal toxicity and you could get the same benefit basically in a much quicker much less expensive way by making if you are doing an animal version a kind of just normal chicken soup or plant-based version like a simple minestrone or something like

that agreed yeah so we're probably going to say a bit more of a fad well yes i'm going to say dare i say fad with respect given to its historical role as a way of concentrating nutrients and also until studies show me that it's completely safe and devoid of any heavy metal contamination so yeah lots of other delicious soups are available indeed thank you guys so much for listening for coming on this wellness journey every single week with me i so appreciate the support the feedback if you do have any guests that you want us to get on the show any facts or fads you want us to debunk then just get in touch at deliciouslyella on social or podcast at deliciouslyella over email

as always if you're making any big changes to your diet just check in with the doctor and otherwise a massive thank you for listening and big thank you to our podcast production partners, Curly Media. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.