Live Your Extraordinary Life With Michelle Rios

Why You Keep Repeating the Same Relationship Pattern (and How to Finally Stop)

• Michelle Rios

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The love you want isn’t unlocked by “trying harder.” It’s unlocked by teaching your nervous system a new story. I sit down with psychotherapist and bestselling author Jessica Baum to unpack why we repeat painful relationship patterns, how anxious and avoidant attachment styles differ, and what it takes to build emotional security that lasts. If you’ve ever chased butterflies, confused intensity for chemistry, or felt “too much” or “not enough,” this conversation reframes it all with compassion and science.

We break down the difference between anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment in real life—not as labels but as adaptations to early caregiving. Jessica explains why talk therapy alone often stalls and how somatic memory lives in sensations like tight chests and dropped stomachs. You’ll learn how co-regulation with safe “anchors” rewires your capacity to self-regulate, why safety can feel unfamiliar at first, and how to tell when you’re stuck in a trauma bond built on fantasy and control.

Jessica also introduces her wheel of attachment, a practical map for spotting where you slide under stress and how to find your way back to security. We share daily practices to extend your exhale, widen the gap between trigger and reaction, and make better choices without abandoning yourself. Along the way, Jessica opens up about her own path—staying with the work even when a partner wouldn’t—and the hard, hopeful truth: real change is possible, but not by bypassing the body.

If you’re ready to stop reenacting the past and start creating relationships that feel calm, clear, and connected, press play. Then share this with a friend who needs a steady anchor today. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what’s one pattern you’re ready to rewrite?

To order Jessica's newest book SAFE: Coming Home to Yourself and Others, and access the Wheel of Attachment referenced in our interview please use this link: https://jessicabaumlmhc.com/interview


WAYS TO CONNECT WITH ME:

SPEAKER_00:

You use the video. Go ahead. What's that? You use the video as well? I use the video as well. Yeah. Make any adjustments you need to. We'll edit the front end as needed. No, this works. This is fine. Great. All right. Welcome back to another episode of the Live Your Extraordinary Life podcast. I'm your host, Michelle Rios. And today's conversation is one I've been really looking forward to because it's about something we all crave yet often struggle to sustain authentic connection. My guest today is Jessica Baum, a licensed psychotherapist, relationship coach, and the founder of the Relationship Institute of Palm Beach. She's also the author of the best-selling book, Anxiously Attached, Becoming More Secure in Life and Love. And her upcoming book, Safe, Coming Home to Yourself and Others, takes her work even deeper, helping people understand that our struggles in love aren't flaws or failings, but psychological patterns wired into our nervous system. So Jessica's approach blends some neuroscience, attachment theory, and some body-based healing to help people move from anxious or avoidant patterns into earned secure attachment so they can show up with more compassion, safety, and emotional freedom, both in relationships and within themselves. So if you've ever wondered what's keeping you from having the love that you really desire in your life or attracting the same dynamics over and over again, this episode is right for you. Let's dive in. Jessica, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. All right, let's delve right in. You've said that many of our relationships, our relationship struggles in general, aren't really personality problems, but they're nervous system patterns. Can you unpack that a bit?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, I don't know where you got that quote, but um usually it's not personality. Normally, what we struggle in relationships is getting close and feeling safe, and what is that is different for every single person based on our earlier experiences and how that shows up. I wouldn't say it's nervous system problems or patterns, but it's it's the combination of two people's embedded patterns and how that shows up within the relationship context, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00:

All right. So let's let's go a little bit deeper into why do we keep repeating painful relationship dynamics even when we quote unquote know better intellectually?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So like when we're younger, um we internalize our connections, our earliest connections around safety, our earliest attachment patterns. Um, we make up stories about ourselves based on the patterns that we are internalizing. So if we feel left a lot, we can feel abandoned, and that can get internalized, or if we feel um certain things get internalized in our soma, in our body, and they become the familiar, they become the paradigm that we've grown up with. It becomes what our bodies know to expect. I know relationships are gonna be painful, I know conflict is gonna be terrible, I know that I'm always gonna be left, or I know that I'm gonna have safety. Like, so we internalize patterns, experiences, um, and it becomes our familiar. So it becomes what our body knows to expect in relationships, and we tend to, without being conscious or healing, we tend to gravitate towards people who resonate with that because it feels familiar. So we'll recreate the familiar if we haven't healed, because it's what feels right for our body and it's what we've learned to like expect. So if I expect that people are always gonna turn their back on me because I've experienced a lot a lot in childhood, that is unfortunately my familiar pattern. And ironically, it's what I will seek out. I will seek out people who do that because it resonates with what I know to expect until I heal it. So that's why it can feel like on repeat. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00:

That makes a lot of sense. And in fact, I have a friend, and I want to use this example because I think it fits exactly what you're talking about, who experienced divorce very early on in her life. She was very small when her parents separated and um remarried. And her experience has been habitual relationships where the man eventually leaves, very similar to the feeling that her father left the home when she was quite small. And we talk about that a lot. Like if we know this, why is it this keeps showing up? And how did how do we change the direction of her particular experience with love?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, that's a great example. So, and I I feel like we end up creating the very thing that we fear because the wound lives in us. So if the wound of I'm gonna be left lives in us, we might pick someone in the beginning that feels like they're never gonna leave us. But if they, if they, if they have a wound and usually and their adaptive strategy is to flee, right? We tend to we attract them. Um, we're looking to confirm our belief system. So we're looking to confirm I have this inherent feeling that I will be left. I know what that feels like in my body. And if you the wind just blows in that direction, I'm confirming a belief system that I am gonna be left. And then that fear usually drives, can drive that person to leaving. So we can recreate it that way. And we're ironically trying to protect ourselves from never feeling like we are left. So the healing of that is to be with the original feeling of being left, you know, and kind of healing that so that we don't try to fill that void with someone who will show us that they're this like it's a really great example. And I don't know if I'm sometimes when we meet someone new, we think, oh my God, this is the answer. This person is never gonna leave me, they're gonna show up perfectly. We're projecting the unmet needs, or you know, I'm never gonna have to feel that pain again. Right. The temporary fix, because eventually they're gonna do something that's gonna activate the pain that is already in there. And then we think, oh my God, here I am again, when really that person's just activating the original wound. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So it goes back to you have to do the inner work. And a lot of times you think you've done the inner work, and yet those same patterns exist.

SPEAKER_01:

So yeah, you have to do the inner work, and our psyche looks for ways to avoid it to protect us from the pain. So if I buy into the fantasy that someone is gonna choose me or someone's not gonna leave me, or I'm gonna find that person that's not gonna do that for me, that's a fantasy that helps protect me from this happened to me and it lives in my body, and I've been very deeply left or very deeply abandoned. So instead of trying to fix it by finding someone who will never do that, I actually have to be with the original wound of that.

SPEAKER_00:

So, okay, how do we get out of that scenario? What's the path forward?

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So in like I talk about this in chapter seven, but like I think like some people listening might like relate to like a trauma bond kind of feeling. A thousand percent. Yeah. And I think the best way I can describe trauma bond is like if I think this person could just act differently, I'd be okay. Right. So we buy into this like fantasy of if my partner just didn't do this, or if they could just show up like they did in the beginning, I'd be okay. And we can stay stuck um for years in cycles like that with the potential or the beginning. And what we need to really start to recognize is what is this person doing that is waking up something in me that lives in my body, and when have I originally experienced that so that I could get out of the dynamic of needing them to show up a certain way and get to let go of the control, which is really hard because we want to control the other person, which is totally normal and natural, and get to what is what are they waking up in me that's more about my earlier wounding? And can I start to focus on that rather than them? So I can get to um the unconscious pieces and become more awakened by what's really waking up in me, not just what's happening in the here and now.

SPEAKER_00:

That's really, really helpful. All right, let's let's talk a little bit about the difference between anxious attachment and avoidant attachment, because we've heard a lot about these terms. You see it out there a lot. Um, I think one of the online influencers, Gillian Turecki, talks a lot about the avoidant attachment style. But I'm really curious if you could help articulate the difference between the two. And then what does it actually look like in real life?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, so there are four attachment styles. There's also disorganized, sometimes called disfearful, but and I talk about this, I unpack this deeply in the book, but an anxious attachment pattern is a child whose primary caregiver is inconsistent. So that can mean that they are dysregulated sometimes, sometimes so overwhelmed with work, sometimes there, sometimes not there, right? So the hallmark for anxious is inconsistency. So the baby learns to leave their kind of energetic system and track mom's nervous system. So they can move towards mom to regulate her system as a way to stay in connection. So they, you know, their nervous system gets bigger, we move towards, we're fixers, we try to co-regulate. Um, and we can usually tell what the other person is feeling, their needs, we can meet their needs because the way that that baby stays in connection is meeting the need of the primary caregiver. So that's a very different adaptation than avoidant, like a true avoidant, and there's avoidant protectors, but a true avoidant baby is in a home where the primary caregivers are more in their left hemisphere, they're more left shifted. And so they might be like checking the tasks at hand and feeding the baby, but they're not deeply connecting. So while anxious had inconsistency where there was some deep connection and then it would drop off and it's inconsistent. A true avoidant didn't get that emotional connection, not very much at all. So the baby learns not even to try. So they're super independent, right? So they they like, what's the point of trying? No one's so they don't build um the neurocircuitry for emotional empathy as much and emotional that those kind of emotional circuits. So they grow up very independent, very quote unquote self-sufficient, but very lonely in their left hemisphere, very successful often, very task um focused. They don't know how to co-regulate well, um, and they never develop the vulnerability to kind of have that kind of intimacy in relationships. So intimacy really scares them. So often they shut down, like often an avoidant person will shut down when they're upset and need space, and an anxious person will get bigger and want to connect immediately to try to feel safe. So they both can't give each other the very thing that they need in the moment when they're scared. So that's why we get into the anxious avoidant dance.

SPEAKER_00:

Is there a way for someone who's grown up with either the anxious attachment style or the avoidant attachment with that deep bonding experience on either way, the erratic or inconsistent or the lack of thereof for that for them to actually evolve an adulthood into healthier experiences? Or are they, I you know, I know people who fit these, fit these so well, and we go back to the well on why they do what they do in relationships so often. And I'm just curious, how do they maneuver through life? Or do they are they do they end up having to find somebody who mirrors that same attachment style? Or how how do they move forward?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I mean, essentially the whole book is how do you heal these deeply embedded patterns? Um healing deeply embedded relational patterns that were created young, which are probably, if you're listening, impacting your life can only happen through healthy relational connections as adults. So uh secure anchoring through the relational patterns help us hold and create spaces for our system to kind of start to be with the original wound and neural nets open and we are co-regulating. And so we absolutely can heal these attachment wounds and patterns inside, but they need to be done in relationship with someone who is has a nervous system that's able to anchor that experience. So whatever is deeply wounded in relationship needs to then be healed in relationship. But absolutely through neuroplasticity and through earned security, which I talk a lot about what earned security really is, I feel like I, you know, I wrote the book Anxiously attached, but I I was anxious and avoidant, like I had both. And very rarely are we one type all the time. I showed up more anxious in my intimate romantic partnerships, but I also had avoidant protectors and behaviors as well. And I definitely have earned security. And earned security is earned through relational experiences, through safe experiences, through disconfirming experiences, which means like if I imagine the person will always leave, instead of moving towards a person who does always leave and re-injure the trauma bond, I now bring the pain of being left to someone who's got the nervous system capacity to hold the original wound. And then I start to slowly learn that not everybody leaves, but you have to reorient towards safe people and what I call anchors in my book.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that. All right, you created something called the wheel of attachment. Can you walk us through what it is and how it helps people move through secure connection?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. And did you get the link when they sent yes? I have that as well. So for those of you that are listening, and I hope I'm doing, I feel like I'm not doing a great job of explaining myself today, but um, in the show notes, there is a visual. So if you buy the book, there's beyond the labels and you get the wheel because I'm gonna explain it, but it's can take a little bit to really fully understand. But when you really understand it, you start to understand attachment on a whole new level. So it's like a circle, like circle square kind of image. And um, the bottom is security, the top is disorganization. And for those of you listening, a lot of people refer to that as fearful attachment, but I'm gonna use disorganization because that's a scientific name. So we have security and we have disorganization. On the right is anxious, and on the left is avoided. So that's that's the squareslash wheel. In the book, I talk about with one parent who is anxious, you can slide up anxiety or you can have secure experiences with them. So you can you can slide on the wheel with one person, you slide on the wheel. So either you're really on the bottom and you're in like security, or you can slide up. They're a little bit anxious. If they're anxious, if their anxiety increases to like terror, rage, abuse, and you turn up the volume on the anxiety, you get to the top, which is disorganization. So with one parent, you can have all of those experiences. Now on the other side, security again, on the on the bottom, and let's say you have a dad who's a little bit more avoidant. You can slide sometimes he's available, sometimes he's checked out, right? If you go up the side, the left side, you're gonna get more and more avoidance to you get to like neglect, extreme neglect and turn back, and then you get to disorganized. So basically, as you go up the sides, you're turning up the volume on either the anxious or the avoidant kind of symptoms or patterns, and then you get to disorganize at the top. So in one household, you can have experiences of everything. With one person, you might even have experiences of everything. So it's not that static, like, oh, my dad was always avoidant. Maybe your dad was avoidant, checked out, but then you have these moments of security with him. And what was that? So let's not put someone in just one category. Let's start to look at the whole picture. And then once you kind of do that with your family of origin, we overlay that onto your current relationship patterns and we start to see like what's on repeat um in the book, we do that work.

SPEAKER_00:

All right. So for everyone listening, um, just remember to go back and check out the show notes. We'll also obviously have the link um to her book, which is coming out the day this airs on October 28th. And we'll also have the link to the wheel for you as well. Was that hard to, I mean, was that hard to understand? No, I mean, I I feel like I got a really good sense of what you're talking about. Um so everyone will let us know what you think.

SPEAKER_01:

Um it took me a while to really like take it in. So I'm sure like you're gonna hear it once, and maybe it's a little confusing, but if you really start to, you really have to sit with it for a while to understand to understand it, you know.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm already imagining people and myself as a mother and caregiver in this whole cycle. Um, it's really an it's a fascinating conversation because you can't help but notice your own experiences or both your your with your parents, but also as a parent, where you show up in this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And a lot of parents listening might be beating themselves up too much.

SPEAKER_00:

Feeling like I'm gonna call my college-age son right after this episode. And apologies.

SPEAKER_01:

No, we can only pass down what we know, and most parents are doing the best they can. So there's always rupture and repair. So don't be too hard on yourself.

SPEAKER_00:

There, there we go. All right. Well, let's talk about why talk therapy alone sometimes is not enough to heal attachment wounds. What role does the body play in true transformation?

SPEAKER_01:

Everything.

SPEAKER_00:

All right, let's talk about it. Let's unpack that.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, I think that a lot of the population understand, you know, attachment styles, but like the next question is like, how do we heal them? And that's really what you know what I'm addressing in the book. But so our attachment patterns and wounds that are created in childhood and and influence us right now are stored in our body, mostly through sensation. And so by we can't think our way out of them, um, they will continue to re reenact in our lives, but without going to the body and holding the sensation together, usually with another nervous system, but without going into like, oh, every time my husband does this, my heart drops, or my chest tightens, or my belly gets queasy, right? Like these sensations that are happening in our body are attachment memories. And so without kind of going to the sensational experience in the body and holding that together, we're just like talking about it. We're not actually being with the original memory, we're not building the capacity together to hold the discomfort, the wound, the pain, whatever it is. We need to hold it because that type of holding wasn't provided for us when we were younger. And now when we are with these experiences, we need to be with the body and what's happening somatically in the body, or else we're really not healing it. We're not, we're not building the capacity to hold it. We're not moving it from the body into the right hemisphere and integrating it into the left hemisphere. So we have to go to the body. It's so important. And if you're doing attachment work with someone, either bring the book to them or make sure that they are going into the body with you, that they're just not just talking about it because it's it's so important. I want people to heal, not just get educated, but also start to be able to heal.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, let's talk about what it feels like. Can you describe? I think a lot of people get really confused with connection. We've talked about this before on the show of how sometimes connection people actually think the butterfly feeling is a good thing. And often where it's the nervous system saying alarms are going off. What is emotional safety supposed to feel like in the body? And how can the listeners begin to understand it better or notice when that's missing?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I think a lot of people mistake intensity for like love and stuff like that. Um true safety is when someone is in what we call their ventral nervous system enough. We're floating out of different states, but I call the ventral is the highest form of evolution for us humans is to be in a ventral state. It's Stephen Porges's work. So, like you're making eye contact with me, uh, we're open, we're feeling safe to share together. Our breath is in a certain way. Mine is probably a little speedy right now, but there's a sense of safety from my nervous system to your nervous system, that we are safe together and we can feel that together. So it's really important that when you're doing this work, that you have someone who has a container of safety for your nervous system to drop into what we call your implicit world. So, what happens a lot is that people who are used to chaos or have been avoiding or um haven't done the work, they'll find someone who is safe and they'll be scared or they'll be like, I don't want to sit here, or this is really uncomfortable for me, or I don't know how to stay present with this person who's really holding this state of safety. Because as we approach the state of safety, if it's like the first time or whatever, we have to also get vulnerable. So this is like the grounds for vulnerability. So a lot of people either struggle with safety because it's foreign to their nervous system. They never had anyone being so emotionally present or attuned to them. So that can be one way of like, you know, when they say, Oh, this guy's boring, or this is just flat, or I can't be underwhelming.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I don't feel that intensity or excitement. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Or even I'm gonna push them away because they're so available. Yeah. It's because our nervous system isn't used to that type of availability, because that type of availability and emotional presence is intimacy, but it also brings vulnerability and it kind of brings us right into like the real world. And we might have to be with the present moment. We're not, you know. So true safety can wake up a lot. I mean, and and the science is the true safety of another person is really the catalyst for healing. But if you don't know that's like what's being awakened, and you can scare you, or it could be something that you don't want to go towards because it might be foreign for your nervous system.

SPEAKER_00:

That makes a lot of sense. Okay. So there's a lot of intellectual awareness about this. I think I know a lot of people that are like kind of get this on an intellectual level, but how do we move someone from that intellectual awareness of I know I do this, I get this, to actually shifting their behavior and relationship? I'm sure it goes back to this anchoring conversation that we started with. But if you could walk us through what that looks like from shifting from an awareness to an actual living.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think that as you start to heal and you start to create awareness for what's going on in your body and you start to hold, like, every time my my boyfriend does this, I react by screaming, right? Like the reaction time is like super fast. As we start to slow down and be like, okay, when your boyfriend does this, like what is it waking up in your body? Can we start to go there and like let's be with that for a while? You're building a capacity for whatever's going on inside of you with the help, right? So over time, what you're doing is you're building space. So you're gonna build a relationship for with whatever he's waking up inside of you. You're gonna learn to be with it, you're gonna learn to maybe even attach it to the roots. We're gonna hold it together, and you're building your capacity for what was just uncomfortable inside of you. And as you build that capacity and compassion and relationship with what's going on inside of you, you're creating space so that when the behavior shows up and you want to react, you're gonna build the space to have what we call response flexibility. So you're gonna be able to say, okay, he's doing this behavior. Normally I want to throw a shoe at his face or whatever you want to do. But now I know it's waking up this intensity in me. Now I've started to be with what's going on inside me. Now I start to understand what it really is. So there's a space that happens over time through like neuroplasticity and healing so that I know, oh my God, he's waking up these early memories or this intensity, and I can be both a witness of what's going on inside me, a witness of what he's doing. And eventually I start to have choices. So I don't become, I'm not as reactive. So that takes time. All of that work takes time to change our behaviors. It doesn't just happen because that's automatic, right? So it takes time to build that tolerance to be with what's going on inside of us and not react automatically.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. This I hear a lot. Um, many people, especially women, describe feeling they're too much or they're not enough. It's either one or the other, right? How do attachment wounds feed these beliefs about ourselves and what helps to rewrite them? I cannot begin to tell you, particularly in the high-achieving women who have gone out and done big things early on in life, likely to prove something, to secure affection from their families early on, all that sort of thing, later in life, find themselves, I can tell you, in a circle of friends, several of them saying, I think I'm just too much for most of the guys I meet. And then I have a whole other crop of friends and uh girlfriends that will say, I just never feel like I'm enough, no matter what I do. It's never enough.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I mean, sounds like they are attracting their familiar.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So if they have big feelings and they had parents that didn't know have the capacity to be with their big feelings and help the them also be with their own big feelings, and then they go out and they maybe pick a more avoidant partner because that's their familiar, then that partner can't handle their big feelings, and they're like stuck right back in their childhood dynamic of I keep picking people who think I'm too much. When the truth is I am totally valid in my big feelings, I just never had the people help me hold them in the first place and help me understand them and be with them. And so I'm going to pick people who ironically are gonna tell me I'm too much again. So the same is true for the other side, you know what I'm saying? So it's like asking that person, like, when were your big feelings too much? What parent couldn't hold that experience with you? Because our feelings are never too much, but our parents' capacity to be with our feelings are sometimes very limited.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Oh so true, so true. Okay, let's talk a little bit about for those listeners who maybe are in currently in relationship or marriages, how can partners support each other and healing without falling into a cycle of codependency?

SPEAKER_01:

I don't love the word codependency, but in the book I talk a lot about trauma bonding and breaking that. And so I think sometimes codependency is around fear. You know, what parts of this relationship are we controlling each other because we don't want to feel our core wound? We can get stuck in those dynamics. Um one of the things I say is that when we think, oh, if my partner could just act differently, then I would be okay. That's a sign that we might be trauma bonding or. Um I want to control my partner because I think maybe in the beginning they gave me this and they're not giving me that anymore, and I'm going to get stuck in this cycle of trying to get them to act a certain way so I can feel a certain way. And normally what's happening, and it was a breakthrough moment for me, but is I'm trying to get to feeling special or feeling seen or not being left. I'm trying so hard to resolve this with someone who can't resolve it for me, to avoid actually not feeling special, actually being left. So to avoid the original wound, I'm working really hard with someone who I think might be able to, you know, take that away from me. But ironically, they just keep recreating it. And that's what a child has to do in a family because we don't have the choice to say, okay, let's say you were my mom and you're responding a certain way. I have to keep trying with you. But when we're in adult relationships, we can get stuck with that little boy or that little girl, keep trying with our partner, and our partner is not capable of giving us what we want, or we think they're capable because they did it in the beginning before the protectors come up. So we just keep trying and trying and trying, and we're spinning our wheels to try to avoid the pain inside. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Let's talk about maybe small daily practices that people can use or do that you've recommended that you've experienced. And I want to talk about your own experience here in a minute to build that emotional safety and regulate the nervous system over time. And if this goes into some of your self-ful work, please go ahead and tell us more about that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, you can extend your exhales always and trick your body back into safety because the respiratory system is the one system that we have access to when we're in a state of dysregulation. So if you're really dysregulated, stop thinking about the problem. Do some box breathing and extend your exhales, and your body will go back into a state of safety. You will trick it back into safety, safe uh safety. But a big message with the book is some people can't self-regulate. They just can't. And so the only way to learn how to self-regulate is through really good co-regulation. And if we didn't get co-regulation, like really good co-regulation as infants and as young ones, we're not going to have really great self-regulation. So, co-regulation, the ability to join someone else's nervous system and have them lend their parasympathetic system to us to help us calm down.

SPEAKER_00:

So that would be like a parent soothing a child that's having an experience to get them back to a state of regulation.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and it's it's soothing, but it's also just being with the discomfort that the child is going and lending your system. So that child is using your nervous system as a way to get back into a state of regulation. This happens because when we're born, we're not born with a parasympathetic nervous system fully developed. So we literally need our primary caregiver to lend us their parasympathetic nervous system so we can co-regulate and build our nervous system from there. So if our parent was anxious or avoidant or really struggled with internal problems or external stress, whatever, and they didn't couldn't hold our dysregulation and co-regulate with us, we grew up later in life not with the ability, not knowing how to self-regulate. So we literally can't learn to self-regulate out of the blue. Many people turn to alcohol. We turn to whatever we turn to, we need to experience a lot of good co-regulation in order to develop self-regulation. So I think the biggest message I want to get out to people is that if you're not regulating your nervous system, it might not be your fault. You might actually have not internalized enough of the capacity for self-regulation and you might need really great anchoring. Because what happens through great anchoring and co-regulation is that after a while, through mirror neurons and residence circuits, is that we internalize that person. So, Michelle, if you were my anchor and my therapist or an anchor, I talk about anchoring relationships, and I was really upset. And I go to you and you don't try to fix me, um, but you're just with me in my emotional experience and you help me by being present with me, attuning to me, and be and joining with me. After a while, I actually internalize that support within me. This is what a secure baby does. So we internalize each other. So if I can internalize you and you're in a state of safety and you are with me through my dysregulation, eventually you become part of me and that regulation gets internalized. Essentially, that's how we move to earn security. And it comes from our ability to pick safe people now to anchor us, to internalize them, to then change the state of safety and security within our own nervous system. And it's through anchoring relationships because that's what a baby needs. They need secure, safe parents to show up and anchor them. And if their parents were anxious or avoidant or disorganized, that's what we internalize. And so later in life, as we do the attachment healing work, we need to re-interalize safe people in order to change our felt sense in our body of safety.

SPEAKER_00:

So in adulthood, let's talk about this because I think this anchoring, finding those anchor people in your life is so critically important, regardless of whether or not you're in a marriage or a romantic relationship, or frankly, you're surrounded with a group of friends. Um, or if you're not, what are you gonna do? Right. Because I do think that there are a lot of men, particularly in adulthood, who have fewer and fewer friends to turn on to turn to turn to for emotional support. Um, and I would, I would say, like one of the wonderful things about being a woman in this day and age is increasingly I think there's awareness of we need each other and we show up for each other. Um, anchoring connection can happen with anyone that you're close with. Like, could it be through a close friend if you're not in a relationship? Does it have to be with your partner? I mean, ideally, it would be with your partner in your love relationship. But let's just say in life, um somebody doesn't have a partner. I have a couple friends who are either divorced or never married. Um, and I notice a reliance heavily on the girlfriend network. Um, it's a real thing for support and security and guidance as they move through life.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, I did a lot of work with my partner, but the truth is my anchoring experiences did not come from romantic partnership. Most of my reenact, my trauma reenactment comes from that. But it can come from your romantic relationship. Sometimes you need like a Mago therapy or need another nervous system in the in the room to help that relationship get through some rough patches. But anchoring, and I I talk about this in the book, anchoring relationships come from special people who have the capacity to show up for us and don't judge us, can maintain a state of safety. And often this doesn't, isn't always in romantic relationships because we're telepathing. Like if you and I are really close and I get scared, your system is more likely to pick up on that. But if you're an anchoring person and you're not my partner, you might not get scared as easily in that kind of relationship. So there are people who have a capacity to hold the state of safety, eventual state enough for us that don't judge us and that truly listen to us. And I have like three or four anchoring relationships. And I talk about co-anchoring and the quality of that we can give each other when we're co-anchoring. And if you have really early attachment wounds, then you need more of like a professional to anchor you. And if I continue to meet this person, my nervous system is starting to register this as love, as care. And I will attract more of it. And not only will I attract more of it, the more I experience it in my nervous system and in my being, and the work shows up in this relationship, um, the more I can actually give it to others too. So I can start to become a co-anchor. So I talk about in the book like finding your anchors, I talk about co-anchoring, I talk about what we need in these anchoring relationships. And most people who come to me don't have one anchoring relationship. Females too. And I and we can go through the Rolodex, and sometimes they find someone that they didn't even think but they had the capacity. And then through working with me, they now know really what that is, and then they start to look for more and more of that in their world. So you're just basically looking for really emotionally available people who are anchoring. And in our culture, in this day and age, like unfortunately, like it takes a little bit of work to find your anchoring people.

SPEAKER_00:

So well stated. I want to step back for a minute because obviously you wrote your first book back in 2024, 2022. Two. 2022. So it's been a few years. And I probably wrote it like before that, too. It came out in 2020. Okay, it came out in 2022, and that was Anxiously attached, becoming more secure in life and love. And now you have this new book coming out. Tell me a little bit about the process. What inspired you to focus on attachment and the nervous system as keys to emotional healing? Obviously, I know you have your own story in this. So tell us a little bit about the work that you've done and how you came to write both of these books that are so needed.

SPEAKER_01:

I talk about an anxiously attached, like when I was like 19 and I ended up in the emergency room with like an anxiety attack, not knowing like what was going on with me. And I remember um I remember picking up the book Facing Codependency. And I just remember as like a young girl feeling like, oh, finally, there's some words to like explain what I'm feeling, you know. Like, I don't love the word codependency anymore, but like facing codependency was like, it was like no one understood me, but finally I picked up a book that understood me. And I I now what I know this book and how healing happens, I didn't know this at the time, but I read every single self-help book under the sun. They soothed me, they gave me some answers, they did not heal me. I could you can't heal through a book, but they definitely soothed me and they started to give me some answers. I'm um an imagotherapist, I'm a relationship expert, I study attachment theory and I study under Bonnie Badanach, interpersonal neurobiology. When I came across attachment theory, everything like codependency, everything started to make sense. Because attachment theory, and when you start to really dive into it, like forget about codependency. That's just a word. Like when you understand attachment theory, it's like, oh my God, like my world, I was like, everything is starting to make sense to me. Um, so I studied attachment theory, but I knew with anxiously attached, even though I knew a lot of the science, my goal was there are so many people who are suffering with the same behaviors that I have, with the label of codependency, with self-sacrifice that are repeating their patterns. And all of this is really attachment. And so I need to bring that codependent audience into the attachment space because attachment is the science of it all. And it's very layered and nuanced and very well researched. I was with a in a relationship in Anxiously attached, and he was doing a lot of work with me. And at one point, he decided he didn't want to do the work anymore. Like the saddest thing in my life because I did not, I did really love this human being so much. I, because of the science and because of everything that I was doing, I was like, I'm gonna continue. I'm just gonna keep showing up, I'm gonna keep doing the attachment work. I had the best support. I understood the science, which is what I provide in the book. Like, I'm giving you guys what I had because if I didn't have the science, I would have thought maybe I was going crazy at certain junctures. Then I had people coming to me saying, Well, I'm anxiously attached, but I have avoidant this and I'm this and I'm that. And I dive deeper into interpersonal neurobiology. That's where the wheel of attachment came up. And I'm like, I have to answer the the questions that are people now are coming to me. Um, I did humbly, I had so much more work to do that I didn't know that I had to do. I left that relationship because he chose to not do the work. And you can stay and leave him. That's but I chose to leave, which was very hard. But then more work came up for me. Um, and so the science and my own personal work, and then like all the feedback from Anxiously attached, like was the way that Safe was born, the the you know, three years later.

SPEAKER_00:

Very brave. I mean, it's it's uh one thing to say, hey, doesn't want to do the work, um, and but I don't know what else to do, so I'm gonna hang out here. It's a much harder thing to leave when you know that it's not going to go where you want it to go. So kudos to you because I think you're modeling the exact behavior. Of course, you're looking at it from a different prism as a researcher and as a um therapist, but I also think you're modeling behavior that so many people want to be able to do and find it so very hard.

SPEAKER_01:

So I think as you start to do the real work, hold the experiences in your body, either that person's behaviors don't wake up as much and you can coexist, or you decide this person isn't giving me what I need and you leave. Both of those can be right answers. It doesn't mean if you do the work, you're gonna leave. If you do the work, you might have more compassion for your partner, you might have more space for their behaviors, you might be fine. Or if you do the work, you might say, you know what, my partner has these behaviors, and I really need this, and I can't get what I need from this relationship, so I have to choose to leave. But that was, yeah, that was, and I'll say this to your audience: like as someone who understands the science and wrote the books, like you can't bypass the work. And that was probably the hardest decision I ever made in my whole life. I mean, there are still days where I wish had my partner had been a little more courageous and had done the work, we could have evolved together. But I know that like everybody can do what's in their capacity, and I now have learned to really respect where people are at, and I'm not the anxious person saying, you avoid it, need to do the work anymore. I'm like, you don't want to do the work, that's fine, but I'm gonna go over here because I need to get what I need. But I wasn't always like that.

SPEAKER_00:

So well, I think that that's the the hope that we all have though, that we make the choices that we need to for what we have and recognize that where people are, they show you where their limits are, really, at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, I talk in seven about trauma bonding. I think what happens with people with early wounding, which I definitely fall in that category, is that we over-identify with our partner's wounds. Like I identified a lot and I wanted him to heal, but the truth is I really needed to focus more on my wounds. And if he wasn't willing to focus on going inward and healing his wounds to the same capacity, I wasn't going to save him, right? And so that's that's kind of like the anxious person wants to do that, but really the turning inward and being with what's going on inside of me, which which was which was what I really needed. But that was a really a reorienting and a letting go, and that was that was really hard.

SPEAKER_00:

All right, as we begin to wrap, I want to give you the final words. So, what's one truth or understanding or awakening that you hope every reader and listener will take away about love and healing and coming home to your ourselves?

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, I hope that everybody who listens can walk away from this book with like a clear understanding of what healing is and what they need in order to move down that path. Um, and I hope that they have a sensational experience when they're reading the book that helps them attach implicit attachment wounds with memory. I hope that they can make that connection through reading the book, like what this type of memory is. It's not explicit, it's sensational. I hope they can leave the book and be like, oh, that feeling in my chest is actually memory. I hope they can make that connection.

SPEAKER_00:

It's been very powerful and illuminating conversation. So thank you, Jessica. For anyone who resonated with what we've been talking about today, where can they find more about your work and connect with you online?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, there's a link that I provided you that um, if you buy the book and you fill it out immediately and check your spam, you'll get a beyond the labels, you'll get the wheel of attachment. And um I just I want to share my my mentor who wrote Heart of Trauma. I have a 40-minute conversation about what it feels like to move from insecurity to security in your body and a talk that's free with anyone who buys the book and is for your audience. So those two things, please fill out the form. You get them. I'm really happy to share. She's an anchor for me, and she's like, um, she's like the the therapist guru who teaches us therapists. So I'm just trying to get her out there to the public because I she's impacted me so much. So you get those two things, and then I'm on Instagram at Jessica Baum LMHC. I will try to respond to everybody. I try to like respond as best I can to everyone. So if you get the book and you're, you know, moved by it or you want to reach out, I really do try to respond. And then I have a conscious relationship group. So I have a team of like six therapists who work coaching, you know, and we work on healing, helping people heal attachment wounds. And so we can work virtually if you want to do some individual work.

SPEAKER_00:

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Jessica. Again, this has been Jessica Baum, and her new book is Safe Coming Home to Yourself and Others. It is out October 28th. I hope that you'll check it out. Please make sure you go to the show notes. The link that Jessica has referred to is going to be in there. Um, and you can get some of the free gifts that she's referring to when you purchase the book. So again, Jessica, thank you for your time and your expertise and for walking us through this really important conversation that really impacts all of us.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much for having me. It was great.

SPEAKER_00:

All right, everyone. Until next time, go and live your extraordinary life.

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Michelle Rios

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