Special Episode: Exploring Attachment, Self-Worth, and Shame

In this special episode of The Secure Start Podcast I am releasing an interview of me, conducted this past week by Edmund Hill-Thompson, Head of Learning at Blue Sky Network Social Care in the UK. What began as a discussion about attachment pivoted to an exploration of its role in building self-worth and alleviating shame amongst deeply hurt and troubled children and young people. 

We hope you like it!

Transcript

Hi everybody, welcome to the next episode of our learning podcast. Today we've gone head to toe and toe to head across the other side of the world to Australia with Colby. Thank you very much for joining us in the late afternoon from Australia, we very much appreciate it. 

How are you? I'm well, I'm actually a little bit chilly. You probably wouldn't expect to hear that from an Australian. No, you wouldn't, and I'm actually quite warm because I'm in a shorts and t-shirt, so we flipped. 

Could you start by telling us a little bit about your background and how you came to focus on attachment, resilience, trauma-informed care over your career? Tell us a little bit about Colby and his experience. Yeah, sure. I think when I was growing up, I experienced a bit of hardship in relationships and I just was very interested in relationships and how they work. 

My attention was drawn to them, I think, through some of the hardships, as I said, that I faced growing up. From my early teens, I was very involved in service to others through youth ministry and managing large groups of young people and the dynamics of all of those relationships. My father wanted me to be a lawyer, but in the back of my mind, I thought I might always work. 

I always thought I might work with teenagers when I was an adult. One of my uncles was a clinical psychologist and he was our youngest uncle. In being our youngest uncle, he was our favorite. 

He was the cool one. Yeah, he was. He's not that cool.

He probably of the bunch. He was definitely the pick of the bunch. He was a clinical psychologist.

It didn't work out, me getting into law or going on to study law. I'd chosen to study psychology anyway. Here in Australia at the time, you couldn't go straight into law. 

You had to study something else first. I got into psychology and stayed in it. Then after my fourth year, which is our honors year, I had a break from study, went and worked as a research officer in our local child and adolescent mental health service. 

In that role, the main research focus was young people who attempt to take their own life. It was in that context that my mind was drawn more and more on the role of relationships, especially family relationships and social integration more generally or more broadly. When I went back to university to complete my postgraduate part of my training, I was drawn more to attachment theory. 

It's such a long time ago. I can't remember what specifically drew my attention to attachment theory. I actually don't remember any of our lecturers talking about it. 

I do remember in the first year of my master's degree doing an assignment on... It was probably this, that the class was divided up into different developmental domains to look at. The one that I got was socio-emotional, so I went down that. I had to produce an assignment and the rest was history, I guess, so to speak.

You've written books on attachment and just accept the scene really. Could you explain why attachment matters so much in our domain in this project? I know, obviously, broadly speaking it matters, but obviously the environment that our foster parents and our foster carers are in, why does having a knowledge of it, why is it so important? Why does it matter? There's a number of reasons. Attachment refers to a developmental process and it impacts all aspects of development. 

Attachment impacts, for example, and the quality of attachment impacts, for example, an infant's exploration of their world, or infant, small child, and so on. The type of attachment or the quality of attachment that a young person has a correlation with their developmental progression in a whole range of areas, not just in socio-emotional, which is where attachment theory and attachments is particularly important. So we see, for example, that children who have a less than optimal attachment history develop their reading skills less than others who have a secure attachment.

I've been working in the child protection sector and out of home care for 30 years and what I've observed is even motor development amongst children who have insecure or disorganised attachment styles is different to the motor and movement development that you would see and that I see in children who have a secure attachment style. Attachment is also important because it's very much implicated in the way in which a person approaches life and relationships from very young in their age. So we have different attachment styles that have been recognised in the literature and through research. 

A secure attachment style, we observe that in about 60% of children in Western countries. Most of the rest have either an insecure or insecure ambivalent attachment style and then a small proportion have what we call disorganised or disoriented attachment style. Now, the reason why I talk about that is because upwards of 90% or more of people in society grow up to either have a secure or an insecure attachment style. 

So it's not really... You wouldn't say 30% to 40% of individuals in society who have an insecure attachment style are... That's massively impacted on the way in which they approach life and relationships and their developmental progression. The impacts are subtle but they're not subtle with that. That's much smaller group who has what we refer to as disorganised disoriented and they're the kids that we see in out-of-home care by and large.

Other children for whom care has not only been inadequate on a whole bunch of dimensions but their parents have either frightened them or hurt them or both. The final thing, and really there's just so much I could say about why attachment is important, but the other thing I would say is that attachment is very crucial to a child's emerging self-concept, their concept of who they are as a person, what their competencies are, but particularly their emerging sense of self-worth. And self-worth really underpins a functional approach, a happy approach, a successful... Let's not be too grandiose about it. 

Self-worth really underpins an ordinary life. People, if we have self-worth, if we have a healthy sense of our own worth, then we tend to make more positive than negative decisions in our life about ourselves. So attachment is very much implicated in a person's emerging sense of who they are and what their worth is. 

Yeah. As well as they develop their competencies. Sorry, I got, when you started talking about self-worth, it just made me start thinking about someone who we both know. 

And you were talking about, we're talking about a lady, Cath Nibbs, and some of our foster carers and foster parents might be familiar with Cath's work. But one of the kind of the go-tos when it comes to keeping ourselves safe online, I'm doing the inverted commas thing, is that it all solely sits in the technology that we're using. And actually you need to look so much further than the device that somebody is holding. 

And ultimately that self-worth leads into so many behaviours or so many situations that we may be find ourselves in for whatever reason. And actually, so to look, if that self-worth is down here for whatever reason, it doesn't just mean I'm going to, I'm going to turn this phone off and that's going to fix everything. Actually, there's so much other work to be done in the background, isn't there? Yes, that's right. 

The devices are important to our young people because, primarily because they afford connection. And connection and attachment are very much interrelated constructs. Attachment has survival, it's thought to exist because it has survival value. 

The infants form an attachment to an adult who they perceive, expect, anticipate, experience to be better able to cope with the world and to keep them safe and keep them alive and so on. And so if you think about attachment and connection as being interrelated and very closely aligned constructs, it is not that much for Leap to say that technology that affords opportunity for connection, which essentially is a lot of what they do as well as entertainment, is actually of great importance to our young people. And we see that in how they typically respond very badly to being limited in relation to that. 

But it is unsafe. And Kath would say that, Kath's not against technology, children in technology. And she would, I think, would say that we need to look beyond the device, as you say. 

And I would agree with that. I think the most important thing that we can do for our children, the thing that, amongst other things, the thing that will matter most to their safety and wellbeing in the world is to ensure that they have a healthy sense of their own worth, their own self-worth. And that, a healthy sense of your own self-worth, directly comes from good attachment experiences. 

Yeah. Good, what we refer to as a set of beliefs, it's amongst the most important of a set of beliefs that arise out of attachment. These are beliefs we have about ourselves, about other people, and about our world. 

And self-worth very much sits across both the beliefs we have about ourself and the belief we have about others and how they'll interact with us. And if we can facilitate those positive beliefs about self and other, then we're directly inputting a functional sense of self-worth. And then we're improving the chances that our young people will grow up to make self-promoting decisions in the world. 

Yeah. You've described attachment as a spectrum rather than like a fixed category. Is that fair to say? So I was going to ask, how can we tell where our kids are on that spectrum? But I've merged my next question into one, because obviously we've said that we want to show young people that they've got self-worth and everything you've just said. 

What chances do we have to help grow those things, grow their self-worth and all that stuff? Is it a fixed state? So actually you've got insecure attachment, and that's where you're always going to sit on the spectrum. Or actually, what can we do to help move them through that spectrum? And at what stages can we strike while the iron's hot? They're kind of key points, key times that we can do those things. Attachment is a spectrum. 

So actually what I would say is attachment security is a spectrum. We do have these categories of secure, insecure, avoidant, insecure, ambivalent, and disorganised, disoriented. And obviously they're categorical, and they sit on the spectrum. 

And there is a spectrum within each, if you like, within each of those categories. But I think the more important thing to be turning our mind to is underlying attachment security. And underlying attachment security is interesting because we can all be at the secure end, we can all be in the middle, and we can all be down at the not-so-good end. 

And what I mean by that is that underlying security, it emerges through time, it emerges through all the significant attachment relationships that we have, the quality of those, and important attachment experiences. And it results in us primarily being somewhere on that spectrum most of the time. But we can... I'll give you a very good example.

Even people who have a secure attachment style, who see themselves as good and capable and deserving, see other people as reliable and trustworthy and available and responsive, and see the world as a safe place, even those people went to a place of, I'm vulnerable, you're dangerous, the world is not safe in April 2020. Yeah. Yeah. 

So right at the start of the pandemic. So we all move backwards and forwards along that spectrum. And we can move backwards and forwards along that spectrum, depending on what's happening in life. 

But some of us live up one end of the spectrum most of the time, we go to the other end of the spectrum some of the time and in between. Others live at the other end. And that's where our kids, where they live is down the more disordered end of that spectrum most of the time.

And sometimes when we see those glimmers, sometimes we see them up at the more positive end. And that can be in relation to relational experiences they're having, or even other things that are happening in their life. So the point I'm really trying to make is that it's not fixed. 

Yeah. And a person's attachment style is not fixed. The attachment relationships can be relatively stable unless there is a change in the dynamic of that relationship.

But the attachment, your overall attachment style, that impacts your approach to life and relationships and your sense of your own worth, that's not fixed. So the question, as you say, arises, how do we change that? The opportunities start from the first days of life. The infant is filtering experiences, is beginning to develop an emerging understanding of how relationships work from very early in their life. 

But rather than tell, to tell us a shorter story rather than the longer story about how all of this works and cut to the chase, so to speak, there are things that we can do that are really important in moving people, moving our kids up and having them spend more time up at the secure end of the spectrum. Things that we can do are the things that facilitate experiences of them, experiences for them, that they are a person of worth, that they are good enough, that they are deserving, that they are heard, understood, that we get it, we're here for you, we get it, you can trust and rely on us. So a little acronym that I'm increasingly using that you won't find in my attachment books, which are really one book, two versions. 

So I rewrote it for the second edition. But an acronym that I like to use these days is aura. Now I'm a bit of a mischievous character and so a clinical psychologist talking about auras might be seen to be a little bit unconventional. 

But aura actually means the felt quality of a person or a place. So the aura of the place or the person, what a person feels in that place or that person. Did you say the felt experience of the place? Yeah, the place and the persons. 

Yeah. So it can be like the milieu of the home. So aura is an acronym that as an acronym, I use it to represent accessible for the A, understanding for the U, responsive for the R and attuned for the A. Now, just to put a little bit of flesh on the bone there, when a child experiences us as there for them, as understanding their experience in our words, in our actions and in our expressed emotions, their experience is you get it. 

You are here for me. You get me. I can trust and rely on you.

I'm safe with you. I am a person of worth with you. And these are the things that support attachment security. 

The presence of an adult who, and I'm talking about in infancy, we don't leave babies on their own to figure it out for themselves. We hover. We're around them a lot. 

When we go away, we come back often. Their experience is this person is always here for me, or at least, and in time, they come to understand that if this person disappears, because at first they do think we disappear when they can't see us, hear us, smell us, touch us, taste us. But this person reappears regularly, including when I need them. 

Yeah. This person seems to know when my tummy feels uncomfortable. Yeah. 

This person seems to know when my nappy feels uncomfortable, when I'm hungry, when I want to be played with, when I need a hug and a cuddle, and they do that. Yeah. This person uses the words that I need to, they interpret my experience in their words. 

This person interprets what's going on for me with their words, and in time, such that in time, I can use those words to communicate what's going on for me. This person is upset when I'm upset, and they soothe me, and in soothing me, we both go to a happier place. These are all, these are the basic building blocks of bringing up babies and bringing them up with a good probability of them having a secure attachment relationship with us and a secure attachment style. 

And look, they, people might say, oh, you're talking about how to do this with babies. What about with the child's three or five or 10 or 15? Or what if it's my husband who had a bad childhood growing up? The reality is, though it looks different at different ages, whether we're one or 101, we still benefit from the experience that people are accessible, trusted people, people we can depend on, rely on, are accessible to us, that they understand us, they get us in their words, in their actions, and in their expressed emotions. So I would say, I'm a big fan of proactively checking in. 

Our children can be very demanding. When I say our children, the children I work with and our listeners care for. Our children can be very demanding. 

There's a long story as to why that is the case. But the reality is, if they've grown up in an environment or they've experienced care that is inconsistent, then they will learn that you have to work really hard to get your needs met. What that looks like when they come into an enriched care environment, like a foster care environment, is that they're inordinately demanding because they're slow to learn that they don't have to work hard anymore. 

They can be really slow to learn. And what's more, they can believe that our endeavours to respond to them are just a product or our response to them pushing our buttons or pulling our strings to make it. So that learning that you have to work hard persists, no matter how hard we try to respond to them when they signal that they need something from us. 

And that's because they often will believe that we only responded because they did something. Perpetuates that maladaptive learning. Whereas if we can anticipate that they need this, we check in proactively. 

Their experience is, oh, I don't have to work so hard. Maybe you are there for me and I'm a person of worth. Maybe I deserve this. 

Maybe I'm loved. If we can articulate what's happening for the child, their experience, if we replace, if we cut down the number of questions, particularly the obvious ones that we ask our children, if we look at the child, look at the circumstances and we say what we think is going on for the child, if instead of asking a question that we know the answer to, we just say the answer. When we do that, the child's experience is, oh, you get it.

My experience is real. I'm a person of worth. When we anticipate their food preferences, when we anticipate that they'd like a bit of, to play a game or do a bit of one-on-one, when we anticipate that they need a bit of a longer bedtime ritual because they've had a tough day, their experience is, you understand me, you get me, I can trust you to respond to me without me having to have a tantrum or spell it out for you. 

When we play with our children, play is the foundation for everything because everything I've said can happen in play, but when we're in play, we fall into sync with each other. Play is the medium for children to truly feel connected with us and us with them. And in those, and again, in those circumstances, they feel they have the experience that they are loved, that they are worthy.

I'm emotional after that because I think it's just, I think you paint such a clear picture of I can see those responses being adapted to a little tiny newborn baby or a 16-year-old teenager. It just, you're just adapting it, but you're still, the fundamental aura is still the same, isn't it? The question that I was, that I wanted to ask is, go on, no, go on, sorry. No, I was just going to quickly say, I do a little activity where I get people to think about what infants need from their caregivers to grow up happy, healthy, well-adjusted and achieve their potential. 

We make a list on a whiteboard and then I put child next to it and I say, what does a child need? And people go, oh, all of that, all of that that the infant needed plus X, Y, and Z. And I say, does an infant need those things? I am, they do. So we also add them to the infant list. Yeah, that's right. 

And then I say, and I've got a video of this actually on my YouTube channel. And then I say, what does a teenager need? And people think about it and they'll go, they need all of those things that the infant and the child needs, plus they need a mobile phone. And I'll say, what does a mobile phone give them? And the mobile phone gives them a sense that they're the same as everyone else, that allows them to fit in, that they're deserving and that they can communicate and connect. 

Do kids and infants need to feel that sense of sameness and to feel that those connection, the access to connection? Yes. It looks a bit different. It's the same thing. 

Okay. So we're still, everyone needs that. And then I say, what does an adult need to be happy, healthy, well-adjusted? And invariably they say all the same. 

So yeah, it just looks different across the age spectrum. So don't be too preoccupied with babying the children. You're not really babying the children in a sense. 

You just do it. It's the same process with a different look to it, so to speak. Yeah. 

One of the things that we hear a lot of our foster carers and our foster parents say is that my young person, it feels like they're pushing me away. So I'm trying to be this supportive person. I'm trying to help them with their attachment.

I'm doing all those things. I'm showing up for them. But it feels like they're pushing me away or they've shut themselves away. 

What kind of would be your sort of response to that, sort of an advice to them around how they can navigate their way through that? Yeah. So it's often referred to as blocked care. In the literature, if people want to look at that, my advice is be mindful of dose. 

So our young people, the young people who block care have felt particularly let down by adults and are particularly mistrustful of adults. And if we come on too strong with them, their urge is to push us away. Yeah. 

Now, they don't always only just push us away. Many of them reel us back in again because they just need something. Then they'll push us away again. 

And then if they need something, and it can be a bit of a roller coaster. But this is a scenario that I would say has a lot to do with dose and by dose, the intensity of our approach to connecting with them, relating with them and responding to them. So if there is those scenarios where kids aren't blocking care or pushing away, I would just be reducing the dose. 

A good example. So if you are checking in with them, maybe just reduce the number of times you check in with them proactively. Okay. 

If you're going to express in your words what you think is going on for them, don't say to them things like, you look like you had the worst day at school today, and you're really feeling quite angry and disappointed with something that happened, something to do with your friends, or you get the picture. Rather you just say, you look like you had a tough day at school today. Tough day? You look like you just need some space. 

Yeah. Low dose. In fact, when kids come into placements, I always recommend start the dose really low. 

When they're eating, if they're eating their dinner with great gusto, you just say to them, you look like you're enjoying that. Yeah. You're noticing them, aren't you? You're noticing the positive things as well as the, yeah. 

You just, you're just acknowledging the mundane. Yeah. You just get into the habit of acknowledging the mundane. 

Your favourite shirt. You really like those shoes. You wish you'd- Because that's what you do for a baby, isn't it? Okay. 

You've just, you've really hooked me with that because I think that really helps land it because that you, oh, you've got your favourite dinosaur t-shirt on. You love that, don't you? And that, that language that you would use towards them, it almost feels probably easier because it's not as, as an adult, it's almost the cultural norm that you talk to babies in that way, isn't it? Obviously, I'm aware that you obviously were adapting it for teenagers. Oh, you've got a dinosaur t-shirt, but you're acknowledging them and you're seeing them as, you're seeing them as a person and you are, yeah. 

Your, your phone is your most important possession. That's what I'd say to a teenager. There's a couple of other things that I would also suggest is if they like certain things, just make sure that, that those, and you don't mind providing those things, just do them. 

Make no fuss. If it's, if they like pizza, just have pizza one night of the week or they like fish fingers or whatever. They, yeah, just without any fuss, even without drawing their attention to it, just provide things that you know that they like and will appreciate. 

And the last one is play. Play, play is your magic power. If you can get them involved in as little as five, five minutes a day of interacting, interactive play over like a game of they have to win because you only learn to lose and can cope with learning to lose when you already feel like a winner. 

And a lot of our kids don't feel like winners. So they've got to, they've got to win. You've got to play their hand. 

So you've got to be happy when they are happy. You've got to be frustrated when you put, when they're frustrated, you got to cheer on the revenge draw four. I'm talking about, we're keeping all this within the confines of it. 

But this is like the best thing because it's one-on-one, you're accessible. You can say I'm in for it now after you put a draw four down. Yeah, that felt good, didn't it? Making me pick up eight, putting your draw four on my draw four. 

You can say it, you're responding to a need for interaction and competency because you're going to let, because you're going to orchestrate it so that they win and you want to be playing their hand. So you want to be outwardly happy and cheering them when they win. And those moments you, oh, you're not going, you're going to be a bit cross with me putting this draw four down. 

Ooh, I'm in for it now. When you do, so there was a start, there was, oh goodness, going back. There's a long story about this, but there's a lot of research to cut to the chase in a particular area of therapeutic endeavor that supports the notion, or in fact, the conclusion that as little as five minutes a day of interactive play supports improved attachment relationships in the home. 

Yeah. So five minutes of UNO, that's our dosage, five minutes of UNO a day. Low dose. 

They come out of the parent-child interaction therapy research, but the reason why they set it as homework for the therapy and the reason why they set it at five minutes is because they were anticipating that no one could possibly say that you couldn't spare five minutes a day for interactive play with the young people. Don't get me wrong, people, I do have people who will say that they can't do that, but if you can, five minutes a day of interactive play, there's good evidence base for that supporting improved relationships in the home. UNO, just the way that you've explained that story around the amount of opportunities it provides, and also for that role modeling, doesn't it, of how you don't get your own way, or sorry, you don't win, or you cheerlead, you support, you articulate your feelings, you can name their feelings and what maybe they're going through. 

Yeah, I've seen so many games and stuff crop up over the years that I've almost tried to force that, and I've always been a bit hesitant with them. Things that maybe, a game maybe about sexual exploitation, or whatever it may be. I personally, for my own work supporting young people, I've always found those kind of difficult to play as a game around that.

However, that's really related to me with UNO, because it's not about anything, it's about the relationship between you and that young person. We always find, I'm sure people have had similar experiences, but we always find that our support workers that go out and work directly with young people have such better conversations with them when they're not facing each other, but they're listening to the radio, when they're in the car, they're doing something that is completely unforced, but they're able to talk through that thing. And so many success stories over the years of that being the thing that's broken down the barrier, rather than that confrontational, look at me and let's have a conversation about this. 

Yeah. And also, the other good thing about UNO is- Yeah, let's think about play. So I was just going to say is that there's so many bloody varieties that have got things that kids might be into, that you can, and now I bought some fake UNO the other day by accident, because my son's massively into Zelda. 

We bought that and it got him playing that because you can get anything, can't you? Sorry, I'm transfixed, it's beginning to become the UNO podcast. What I was going to say is, the latest version is Mercy. A number of my young people that come to see me love Mercy. 

There's a Mercy rule when you get 25 cards. Now, believe me, you can get the 25 cards in your hand very quickly, but none of them like using the Mercy rule. They want to go without it. 

They want to see me with 100 cards, because they're a big dick. And it's not a five minute game. I've had one hour games of no Mercy. 

But anyway, it doesn't have to be. It's interesting what you say about sitting alongside. Sitting alongside doing a two-player video game is just as good as well. 

We used to, with my own children, I had a very compressed time with my children to develop my relationship with them during the week, because I was working as a clinical psychologist in private practice and that meant long hours. But when I got home, I would make sure that I would always go and find them and touch base with them proactively. I'd always comment on what I was seeing was going on. 

I'd offer to engage in an activity with them and we'd have a blast with them. And one of them that I really remember when the kids were little was after their baths, they'd be on their towels and we had wooden floors and we'd be racing up and down the hallway, dragging them along. And they loved it and I loved it. 

And that's the point. We both loved it together. It's very hard. 

Look, it's very hard for kids. We want to make it very hard for the kids to maintain the idea that they're bad and unlovable and that we're mean and nasty and uncaring. And little gestures like just popping your head in, making their favourite food, noticing that they look like they've had a crap day and just need a bit of space. 

Engaging in a playful interaction over the light. It's not rocket science. No, and I think that's what I've loved so far. 

I've loved about our conversation is that it is broken it down into real life things that I could feel really emotionally attached to everything that you're saying. And I'm seeing all the kids in my head. I'm seeing all the kids that we've supported. 

I can see, I'm hopefully seeing some of our foster carers listening to this and really grasping that and going, yeah, this is what I'm doing. And I can add to it from what you're saying to them. They can add to it from what you're saying to them. 

We recently, I just want to just touch on Shane quickly because I want to talk about that self-compassionate view, compassionate view that we may have of ourselves or our kids may have. We recently did a podcast with one of our foster carers all about Shane with Lisa. How can we use our knowledge of attachment and play, like you've said, and using our aura? How can we help our young people move towards that more compassionate self view that they may have of themselves? All of the things that I've suggested help. 

Yeah. Yeah. So far all of the things. 

Now, I think as an aid to carers or adults working with our young people who often experience pervasive shame, that sense that they are just the most worthless creature. And all of what I've talked about has been about combating that. But I think there are certain, also certain scenarios that will come up and particularly around behaviours of concern that I would add to what I've already spoken about. 

And that is the way in which we respond to behaviours of concern will, because they know that the behaviours are problematic by and large, after a certain age. How we respond to those will either compound or, what's the word I'm looking for? I'm thinking cement, but you know what I mean, hopefully, their shame. Yeah. 

Or it can go some way to alleviating it and supporting less shame. So I think when we're dealing with behaviours of concern, we need to be turning our mind to the fact that no one does anything for no reason, and neither do our children. They're not doing anything, including their behaviours of concern, for no reason. 

When we just respond to the behaviour, when we discipline in relation to the behaviour, we miss the point. And we also, as I say, ensure in some, that they continue to see themselves as a person of no worth and us as mean and nasty and uncaring. And that's just, that's not a good outcome.

What we want to be doing is turning our minds to why they're doing what they're doing and responding to those reasons. Okay. There's a lot of work in the literature about needs and a lot of behaviours of concern arise because of unmet needs, but it's broader than that. 

It's all sorts of things. It's include, it's the way they're thinking, it's the way they're feeling, and it is what they've learned about how the world works as well. Okay. 

And that, and for people who want to look at my books on attachment, I talk about the AAA model. In terms of those three areas, the way they're thinking is the attachment representations or internal working models that I referred to in brief a little bit earlier, what they think of themselves, other people and their world. You need to say, think, turn your mind to if they could or would, how would this child or young person truly or truthfully describe themselves, other people and their world? How fast is their motor run? So how activated is their central nervous system? Arousal or how activated the nervous system is very much implicated in behaviour, in emotion, sorry. 

It's the physiological aspect of emotion. And one of the major behaviours of concern is angry, demonstrative, tantrum, meltdown type behaviours. But that's a motor running too fast. 

How fast is their motor typically run? Are they too close to the red line or blow-up point? And what have they learned about how to get their needs met? Do they have to be really demonstrative? Do they have to be really demanding? Do they have to be really subtle? Do they have to be a little bit deceitful? Do they need to be a little bit underhanded to ensure that they get their needs met? Now, every time we just respond to those problematic behaviours as problematic behaviours, rather than a reflection of how they would truthfully describe themselves, other people in their world, rather than how fast their motor runs, rather than what they've learned about how to get their needs met, we compound their shame. Yeah. I always say, if you do find yourself needing to intervene in relation to a behaviour, as quite a side for what I've said already, if you need to take something away, give them something back. 

If you need to tell them off, praise them in some other way. If you need to be restrictive of something, like their access to technology, be generous in another way. Try to avoid an outcome where they experience themselves as unworthy and us as uncaring. 

And play to their strengths. They all cultivate interests and play to them, play to their strengths. Self-worth, I think, is an antidote, probably the most important antidote to shame. 

You can't get rid of shame, though. Lisa Atherson, one of my podcast guests, I'm not sure if that's Lisa you were referring to, she's developed shame containment theory, and she was on my podcast a little while ago. Now, shame is not just a discreet event, it's a process, and it's necessary. 

Shame is a bit like anxiety. They both stop us from doing dumb things that put us at risk. Shame in terms of our relationships, anxiety in terms of, oh, me chasing brown snakes out of the garden here. 

Brown snakes, they're the second most venomous, and they are per capita the most deadly snakes in the world, and they live in my garden in summer, and I have been known to chase them, and they have been known to rear on me. So I don't have enough anxiety around snakes, so I need to get some of that anxiety back, stop me from doing dumb things with the brown snakes in particular. So I think I come from a point of view, and I know, look, I know you can't praise the kids.

You can, but if they don't believe what you're praising them about, they'll just think you're lying to them or you're buttering them up. Yeah. Yeah. 

It's better to do all of these things that I've said that make it easier for them to think of themselves as a person of worth, and harder for them to think of us as harsh, and that they're deserving of that harshness. Yeah. We've got one final question to wrap up the things we've spoken about.

Obviously, like that, trying to, obviously throughout this whole thing, we are tempering ourselves, aren't we? We've got our own internal beliefs, our thoughts. Maybe we feel hard done by, maybe we feel certain things by the way that our young people are behaving, the way that we've got to respond to them. Maybe actually inside we're like, you know what, this has really pushed my buttons, but actually we know for the greater good, this is the response that we need to give to our young person, because actually in the cold light of day, we know actually that these things are for whatever reason. 

So what's your kind of advice that you give to those sort of caregivers around their own kind of topping up their own attachment or their own therapeutic parenting up so that they can continue to be in that place to not always get it right, but they can continue to be in that place to do the best that they can? I think having peer support, talking to other people. I think being around other people who understand our experience. So for our carers to be around other carers.

Some of these things that I talk about are relatively recent insights. What I'm going to say after this little bit is a longer one, but I do think laterally I have come to more and more appreciate, I've already known it in one sense, but the power and the uplift that comes from just being around people who understand our experience and get it. So there's that. 

Self-care is bandied around a lot, including by what I've done. I've done so. I think this is something that I've believed for a long time and pushed for a long time. 

A lot of the suggestions around self-care behaviours, I've observed foster carers rarely have the time and often don't have the financial resources to do those things. Particularly if you've got a very needy, demanding young person in your care. I think one of the best things that you can do both for you and for the young person in your care is read up on what recovery from attachment trauma looks like.

What are the behaviours that we would expect to see that would mean that we're cutting through here, that we're chipping away, that we're making a difference? The reason why I say that is because our brains are programmed to be problem solvers or problem solving selectively. We have more negative thoughts than positive thoughts. We attend to more positive negative things than positive things. 

We just do. And that's spurned a whole industry around positive psychology and retraining our brains to be more aware of the positive. And that has some worth as well.

But what I'm saying in terms of educating ourselves about what recovery looks like is that if we don't know what it looks like, then we will selectively notice the enduring problems. We will notice them. And the problem with that is that we will feel like a failure.

And the kid who's... Now, here's a construct for you. It's the looking glass self. Children see themselves as they experience adults to see them. 

So if we see them as a bundle of problems, they see themselves as bad and inadequate and deficient in some way. So it's both a gift to ourself and a gift to the child if we educate ourselves about what recovery looks like. And because then we'll notice those things that happen, those glimmers, those progression towards a more positive trajectory without holding in our minds what that recovery looks like, we will only see the problems. 

And when we do know what recovery looks like, what the good stuff looks like, we're pleased, we're happy, we're proud. And the children get to experience themselves in a different way too. Yeah. 

You're topping up your cup. You're getting the... You might not be getting the massive feedback from them, but you might be getting the little subtle signs because you're aware of them. It's almost like your self... My car, when I put my brakes on, it puts a bit of energy back into the car. 

So it's almost like you're regenerating yourself whilst you're doing the doing, aren't you? And what a beautiful way to charge your battery from noticing those small steps that your young person's taking, which is... Everyone's got their own draws and their own reason for coming into fostering and actually being able to see those things that your young person is achieving, that will... Yeah. Even if you might not see them unless you've got that knowledge of, like you say, what those nuanced recovery from trauma attachment might look like. Okay. 

We are going to try and signpost some more of that to our foster carers because I would love more people to notice those things. Can I just say a massive thank you for taking us on this journey with you today? I've really enjoyed it. I've got a lot of things that I need to think about as well. 

My own son, we are... My youngest son is going through quite a few challenges at the moment with certain bits and pieces, and there's quite a few things there around the playfulness and Uno that I am going to be absolutely taking on board for myself. And I hope today that our foster carers and our foster parents, I know they will have taken so much from today. So hopefully this won't be the last time we talk. 

If anybody who is on our learning platform, if you look underneath, there'll be links to Colby's books, there'll be links to his website, and also to some of his podcasts, which we've already got on our platform, such as Wama Lisa, Cath, and some others, as well as his blogs that he publishes online regularly. And yeah, check him out online. And yeah, Colby, just thank you so much for your time. 

I personally really appreciate it. And yeah, I hope you have a nice evening, not rest of your day, because it's evening. And don't chase any snakes. 

Thank you. Now the snakes are all in bed at this time of year.