Episode 392 - Michael John Cusick, "Understand Safety and Boundaries in Attachment Relationships"

Welcome to the Restoring the Soul podcast with Michael John Cusick. In today's episode, Michael and A.J. Denson continue their deep dive into the four S's of attachment: Seen, Soothed, Safe, and Secure. Drawing from the work of Dr. Dan Siegel and integrating insights from neuroscience, psychology, and spiritual formation, they explore how our early relationships shape not only our emotional lives but also our connection with God. 

This conversation unpacks the vital importance of safety in relationships—both physical and emotional—and how boundaries, repair after conflict, and humility all contribute to healing and connection. Whether you're a parent, spouse, or someone seeking deeper intimacy with God, this episode offers practical wisdom and hope for cultivating secure attachments in every area of life.

Transcript

Michael John Cusick 0:00

Hey everybody, it's Michael. Welcome to the Restoring the Soul podcast. Today we're digging in again to the four S's, and I'm talking with my friend AJ. Hey, AJ. Hello, good to be here. Good to see you. Good to see you. I'm glad that we're returning to this uh to this conversation because we had hoped to basically do one, maybe two podcasts on this, but we're only a third of the way through this idea of the four S's as it relates to attachment. So we're I'm glad to keep going with you today.

AJ Denson 0:33

It's gonna be great. I'm super excited. Um yeah, well, I mean, let's dive right in. As before we get into it, uh, we've talked about uh seen, we've talked about soothed, and today we're gonna talk about safe. But as we've been going through these, what is uh talking about these four S's meant to you?

Michael John Cusick 0:52

Aaron Powell It's been great for me because every time I get to return to the material in sacred attachment, uh it just reminds me of how important this is to help us understand not just our attachment style, but uh the process of attachment, what it actually means in terms of whether we've gotten these needs met. And we've we've received a surprising amount of feedback, uh, which we don't often get, just about how helpful it's been to walk through this. So I'm glad actually that we're doing it slow, that we're taking our time, because it seems like people want to go deeper than just you know broader and get get through the material. But let's start with um a review ever so briefly. These four S's, seen, soothed, safe, and secure, were first talked about by Dr. Dan Siegel, the eminent child psychiatrist, known as kind of the architect of interpersonal neurobiology, which is a big focus of what we do here. That's basically the idea that everything that happens to us, and especially relationally, shapes our brain, shapes our nervous system, and shapes the person that we become. And because the uh, this is not Dan Siegel anymore, but because the soul is inclusive of the body, we need to pay attention to that spiritually. And one of the big ideas from sacred attachment is that to the degree or not that we have a secure attachment in our human relationships, that's the degree to which we'll have a secure attachment with God. And if we don't have a secure attachment with God, we'll typically go in one of several directions. We'll either tend toward uh struggling to trust by trying to strive to be busy, to do for God, to struggle with an insecurity about whether we're really saved, whether God uh loves us because that's his job, or if that's his nature, struggling perhaps to believe that God actually likes us. Kind of an anxious style of attachment. And then there's the avoidance style where our hearts might actually be dialed down in relationship to God, and we might actually believe that there's not much available from God on this side of life, and that Christianity is really just about trying to get through, to muddle through, and then hopefully to get to heaven uh where things will be better. And of course, things will be better in heaven, and as heaven comes to earth, as Revelation 21 talks about, and even as I read this morning, as Isaiah chapter 65 talks about, about what God's going to do with Jerusalem, speaking back uh in the uh third or second century BC. Um, so these attachment styles are more than just psychological help. They give us spiritual insight, and hopefully God will bring spiritual revelation as we talk about this to help people see that they're not stuck in a place of, oh, this is just the way it is with God and it's always going to be this way. But to help people understand that it's not about knowing more about Christianity, it's not about doing better and performing more, it's really about learning to trust and receive, but we can only trust and receive to the degree that we have a secure attachment. Thus, understanding seen, sooth, safe, secure. So seen is when that child or the adult has a sense that there's someone who's there with them that says, I get you. I get who you are. Not just I see you physically, not just, yeah, you're a unique individual, but I actually understand and get and bless the part of you that's inside in your inmost being. So soothed, if seen as I get you, soothed would be I've got you. And this is where um the person experiences, the child experiences a parent who is available and responsive. They're there with them physically and not just necessarily physically present two feet away, but in their life. They're engaged and they're responsive to their needs. They're attuned. And then that allows a child to learn how to self-soothe and to regulate. So that's where we've been. And today we're going to talk about safe and secure, of course, as we've already set the stage. Yes.

AJ Denson 5:35

Looking forward to it. Well, let's dive right in. Let's jump into safety.

Michael John Cusick 5:39

Yeah. So the big picture is that um this is about the parent, the caregiver saying, I've got this. I've got you, is the soothing in the dysregulation and in the distress. Safety is this situation, this circumstance, this moment, this interaction that is causing distress and potentially causing harm. I've got this. So at the most basic level, this is where the child experiences protection, not just from physical danger, but from emotional harm as well. So in so many homes, there's a tension that's there. There, you know, there may be fighting off in the distance, parents yelling and screaming that causes distress in the infant, in the child, in the teenager, and in the adult. You know, we're all familiar with that moment where there's an interaction and we just feel tension, right? And that's a kind of emotional threat that we feel in our nervous system. And the emotional protection is just as important as the physical protection. The safety is when there's a rupture, when there's conflict or some kind of disruption relationally, that the child experiences repair after that relational rupture. And this idea I know is helpful to so many people because when people start to learn about attachment, if they have children, one of the first things they'll say is, man, I've already screwed my kids up. And it's so important to let people know that there's abundant research that tells us that a parent can be full of ruptures. And as long as there is repair, and repair doesn't just include saying, I'm sorry, it includes engaging the child's heart about what was going on, what that child was experiencing, saying things like, you must have been really scared, or did mommy or daddy upset you, creating the conditions where that child can actually say, Yes, I was really scared, as opposed to that child having to somehow perform for the parent and say, no, I wasn't scared, and at which point the parent might just disengage. So repair is about so much more than just kneeling down and saying, Oh, I'm sorry. Uh just like in our marriages, uh, you know, we've we've talked about this amongst other men, you and I, AJ, that you know, you can't just say, I'm sorry, and then kind of move on with your wife. You have to engage with their heart and allow them to hear our heart about where we've caused harm, where we've caused uh conflict disruption, pain, etc. And that requires a kind of humility. So for the safety to happen in the midst of disruption or conflict, there has to be a humble stance of the parent to attune to what's going on inside of the child, to what's going on between the parent and the child, and to put words to that and ultimately to engage the child's heart. And again, when that repair happens, a parent can be very human. A parent can blow it. Now, that is not permission for anyone to say, you know, if I have an anger issue, or if I'm overly rigid or controlling, or if I didn't pay attention to the child when they were in pain or had a fever, uh, that doesn't mean that you have a free pass not to parent. But what it does give you is permission and freedom to be human and to use failure and conflict and struggle as a means to connection, not a barrier to connection. You know, one of the things that restoring the soul that we're always talking about is that any kind of conversation, including conflict, can lead to connection when there is safety. In the absence of safety, that conversation, whether it's I want to go here on vacation, and the spouse says, Well, I don't want to go there, I want to go here, those kinds of conversations can turn into conflict and toward us protecting our hearts and either escalating uh or pulling away. And once again, we see anxious and avoidant attachment playing out there. Um, so any kind of conversation where there's safety can lead to greater connection as opposed to less connection.

AJ Denson 9:59

Aaron Powell So many really good things. First, I'd love to know more about the difference between soothing and safety, like in those two S's. To me, they sound very similar as you're creating an environment that's in which your child can, but you use the word repair for safety. So could you tell me the big differences between soothing and safety?

Michael John Cusick 10:22

Yeah, soothing has to do with the parent addressing distress, dysregulation, activation, physical pain, physical discomfort, even for an infant who can't regulate their own body temperature, uh, attuning to and making sure that that child is warm and wrapped in, as the Bible says, swaddling clothes, and all of those things are attuning to uh distress. Affection is also a part of soothing, but it's not necessarily entering into a negative or unpleasant state. It's actually bringing forth on a physical level or on a facial level with nonverbals, a sense of delight, uh, a sense of emotional joy and awakening that when you walk into the room, whether I give you a hug or not, that you know that you're physically able to sense that it is good for you to be with me, and I'm delighted and grateful to be in your presence. So that can go to soothing. It's taking away distress or discomfort or some kind of physical unpleasant need, or it's bringing a sense of positive delight, care, joy toward the other, which creates a positive result, right? So one's taking away negative, one is putting in positive. Both of those are soothing. Safety is really about uh not just protection, but things like emotional boundaries. So protection, once again, would be keeping the negative at bay for prenatal situations. You know, back in the 60s, my mom smoked and drank alcohol. She wasn't an excessive drinker, as far as I know, uh before I was born in 1964. But back then, parents just did that. Today, if a woman is smoking and pregnant, you know, she's she's people are gonna call child protective services. So there's this keeping away of the negative, uh putting kids in car seats, you know, presenting preventing them from flying through the windshield, um, safety locks at home. Uh when I was a kid, there was no such thing as safety locks. And now, you know, every parent has the kitchen cabinet uh under the sink where the chemicals are locked up in those kinds of things. Um, safety preventing um preventing loud noises, preventing a child from falling out of the crib, preventing the negative. But then the positive would be things like boundaries. Boundaries are a big part of safety. And boundaries can either be too rigid, where a child doesn't have freedom to move into their world, to explore, uh, or they can be too loose, too unpredictable, a lack of boundaries. Since I was the youngest of five, and my parents had kind of seen their other kids survive, and there was a 10-year age gap between myself and my oldest sibling, I had very few boundaries. And I kind of knew intuitively that if I just did what my parents told me, I was kind of the good kid, at least on the outside, uh, that I'd be able to do whatever I wanted. And there were times when I probably needed stronger boundaries. Um part of safety is also uh with boundaries, as I said, being able and empowered to move into our world to explore and to discover. And um, this could be something as simple as babies. I remember as our kids were little and all of our friends, you know, one of the things that that babies do, and you know, they're probably got to be a year old, but but reaching for car keys or something shiny, and they put the car keys in their mouth and they taste that it's metal and it doesn't taste good, and then they put it out. But, you know, the parent that's hovering and helicopter and doesn't allow a child to take the most basic reach into the world, whether it's with their hands or whether it's with their inner being, and discovering on a age-appropriate level, you don't go let an infant touch a hot stove, much less a sixth grader, but to be able to get pots and pans out of the cupboard uh w you know when that's appropriate and and warranted, and to sit and bang those pots and pans. And as opposed to you can't do that because there's so much anxiety or nervousness that those noises are overwhelming to the parent or caregiver. So the way that a child moves into their world with appropriate boundaries, neither too rigid nor too loose, actually creates a sense of safety because that child says, I can move into the world with cause and effect, and that's a good thing. As opposed to I move into the world, I go to pet the dog, and the dog is untrained and vicious and it bites me. So again, the safety is something that the parents provide, especially at the younger age. And what that that what that requires is for the parent to see and to soothe so that safety then emerges from that. And what this allows is for the child to feel present within themselves, within their own body, to be connected to themselves and their own body, and to have a sense of confidence. And if this is uh sounding familiar to you, AJ, I wish we had the visual here for our listeners that this is basically the rest of the pyramid that I build when sometimes I'm sitting with clients, or as you've seen on our men's weekend, where the four S's are at the bottom, scenzo, safe, and secure. And then on top of that, there's this layer, which is how a child initiates and moves into their world, that bottom level, which builds trust, scenzo, safe, secure, could be thought of as inflow. I use four S's. It's a one-directional thing where parents flow into their child, it's not the other way around. Then initiative is where that child can begin to discover, to develop a sense of confidence and competence as they discover. So uh as they are in preschool drawing with crayons, markers, uh being athletic and agile, and others maybe more tender and compassionate. In other words, you start to see the child's personality uh emerging as a result of these four S's, and then there's a passion that develops around that. And you see this child that starts to have the earliest sense of identity that's there.

AJ Denson 17:08

Um, as uh you talked about uh humility before, you you've talked about boundaries here. Um it seems like there's a decent level of self-awareness and self-work you can do to really uh have the skill set of bringing safety into a child's life. Uh could you go into uh first boundaries on just different things? If a parent was like, I don't understand healthy boundaries, this is all kind of new for me. Where would you start to begin on those resources or learning more about that?

Michael John Cusick 18:18

Yeah, great question. So the first thing I would say, and we won't go too deep into boundaries here today, because we could do a whole series of episodes on that, but the question is important. So again, boundaries it's a it's a bigger topic than how I'm framing it, but again, they're either too rigid or too loose. And self-awareness really is a big part of this. Rigid boundaries are because there's some kind of inner distress, or to use Dan Siegel's words, chaos. Um, where there is um where there's chaos, boundaries tend to be loose. There's the inability for the parent to uh to engage themselves, to be self-aware, to be aware of their own distress. And it's often in that chaos, more of a shutting down within the parent, what we would call hypo-arousal of the nervous system, or in polyvagal terms, for those that know that from therapy or trauma work, there's a dorsal collapse in the dorsal vagus nerve. So that parent or caregiver might tend toward being more frozen, numb, tending toward dissociation. Uh, and that parent will tend to have loose boundaries and unpredictable because they simply can't be engaged. They're under engaged. With the rigidity, that's where the parent is going to be more anxious. On the other side, they're in a hyper-arousal of the nervous system. And rather than tending toward being frozen and numb, they're more in a fight or flight mode. And that's going to create rigid boundaries. You can't do this. No, that's not safe. Don't do that. And of course, there's an appropriate, an appropriate level of attunement and even vigilance for a child. But the minute that that vigilance crosses into hyper-vigilance, then that's something that that child will inevitably feel squelched. That child will not inevitably, but potentially have to either dial down who they are and diminish their thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs, like, oh, I am drawn to playing with the pots and pans because I like the uh the tactile sense of holding them and I like the sounds. And if the parent says no to that, those were only created for cooking out of their own anxiety, then something in that child doesn't get to express itself. Something in that child doesn't move into its world, and their discovery of the world doesn't lead to confidence and competence. It leads to a sense of doubt. It leads to a sense of, I'm I'm not sure that it's good for me to move into the world. So the first thing that's required is a sense of self-awareness. And I would talk about that on two levels. Self-awareness as a connection to self and a person having self-awareness about am I present or am I distracted? Do I feel connected to my own body? And there's a lot of reasons also why a person might not be connected to their own body, because a mom or dad who's spending time with their kid on any given moment might have COVID or a bad cold or allergies or they're just really feeling under the weather, and every parent has moments like that, and that's okay. But if we're chronically feeling disconnected from ourselves, and if we're chronically feeling disconnected from our body, that's something to pay attention to. And you can work on that in therapy. You can read good books, you can listen to this podcast and say, man, what's the next step for that? And I would say talk to a therapist about that. There's that's not uh something that you have to live with. And very often when people are in that state of hypoarousal and they're shut down and they're frozen, they're actually unaware that that's not normal because it's been normal for so long. The person who tends to be anxious is generally aware of their anxiety, but they too might think that that's normal. Because many people with chronic trauma, and this is the case for me, they have a chronic low level of anxiety. That um feels completely normal. I remember my therapist saying to me probably 20 years ago, he said, Michael, are you aware that you're an anxious person? And I said, What are you talking about? That's ridiculous. You know, I thought anxious people were wringing their hands and pacing back and forth, you know, like Chicken Little saying the sky is falling. And that's the very first time I started doing somatic work. Pay attention to what you're feeling inside. And then as I started to describe on a physical level what was happening inside of me, that my mouth was dry, that my chest was almost always pounding, not just because I drank a lot of caffeine, but because there was this, probably on a scale of one to ten, a three or four on a scale of one to ten that was always there, that was keeping me in hypervigilance and keeping me scanning my environment and keeping me in a place where I was always ready to act if there was danger or threat, because my system was reading there's always a threat there. And that's a part of uh what in my case was complex PTSD, although we didn't have that term to describe it back then. Yeah. How's that for uh how's that for a long answer for the difference between soothed and safe?

AJ Denson 23:56

Hey, that is perfect. I love it. Um and so kind of going into something you said earlier about repair, um, there's the way I see it is almost like there's levels and the base level, like your child gets hurt and parent comes in and repairs, like, oh, I'm so sorry. Um, that makes sense that it hurts. What there's they're bringing a sense of safety to the child. And then there's that level two that you almost talked about of humility in I'm the person that caused the pain, or I am the one that's put this person in a state of hurt and uh needing humility to enter into that. So from either from your experience or your knowledge, what would you say to a person who really wants to be able to empathize and to connect and bring the four S's to maybe their spouse, child, whoever they've hurt, but is really struggling with being able to bring that because it's about them?

Michael John Cusick 24:54

Yeah, that's a fantastic question, AJ. So if the first thing is self-awareness, the second thing would be self-soothing. And that means that after there's an awareness and a recognition of the parent being aware of what's happening in them, you know, I as the parent need a timeout. I need a respite. I need my spouse to tag. You know, we used to literally say, tag, you know, you're it, when each of us uh would would reach a certain threshold where we were going to lose it. Uh, and that was particularly true for me because when my children were little, my window of tolerance was probably a third of what it is now. We know that trauma, uh particularly childhood trauma, uh, although it can be any any kind of trauma, including single episode kinds of things now, that trauma narrows and closes our window of tolerance. So think of a window that's wide open or that the shade is wide open, and then you pull it down two-thirds of the way, and you have a whole lot less light right now. So our ability to tolerate stress and distress is actually decreased through trauma. The good news is that that window can be expanded, and resilience is not just that you bounce back, but that you can actually develop a greater tolerance for stress and distress when it happens than before you even experience that stress or distress.

AJ Denson 26:27

That's great. Thank you for that. Um as we're walking through these four S's and we've related, we even started before we even went to the four S's about the relationship of attachment and Jesus and the Trinity and whatnot. So, as we're talking about safety, how would you describe experiencing safety within your relationship with Jesus?

Michael John Cusick 26:51

Man, isn't that a beautiful question? There was a time where I didn't even know safety was a category for God. Um, I thought that Jesus died on the cross for one reason and one reason only, and that was because I was bad. I was a sinner for all of sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and to die so that I could go to heaven. It was that simple. Safety wasn't a category because my sins were forgiven, but the belief, very erroneous and mistaken, is that God wasn't pleased with me, that I wasn't safe with him, because if I screwed up, and back then I was a porn and sex addict and a compulsive liar uh through through uh uh starting at age eight as a as a pornography addict through junior high and high school, a lot of confabulation and deception and making up stories with my peers in high school and ninth grade. I didn't want to be in marching band, but I was, and so I feigned a knee injury the whole year uh that I actually came to believe was a real thing, even though it wasn't. And I just kind of moved my way through life using my own ability to manipulate and navigate through deception and through numbing myself without ever really having any accountability for that. And when I became a Christian when I was 16, that changed some, but my shame also increased with that. And so with God, safety means that we don't have to feel shame. Psalm uh 25, verse 2, and I pray this every morning. Well, I'll just go ahead and say verse one. To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul, in you I put my trust. Do not let me be put to shame, nor let my enemies triumph over me. No one whose hope is in you will ever be put to shame. So God created us with a capacity for shame, this capacity to feel exposed, but think of shame in that context as an alarm that there's disconnection. And rather than move farther away, because shame always creates distance, there's the opportunity in shame, as we see in Genesis 3 when God shows up saying, Adam, where are you? and then clothes Adam and Eve with garments of skin. Shame is the opportunity, despite everything inside of us that says don't do this on a physiological level, to move closer to love and care and embrace. And that's the essence of secure attachment. The child with a secure attachment knows that they can relax in the strength and the goodness and the care of the people around them, the mom, the dad, the caregivers. They can relax in the strength and goodness of caregivers. And as an adult, a secure attachment means I can be me not having to get bigger, more impressive, more than I am, not having to dial down and be less impressive because I'm a threat or be less than I am, but I can be me and relax in the goodness and the reliability of the relationships that I'm in. And that's the essence of trust. I can trust that there is a secure relationship where love has me, where another person says, I've got you. That's what security is. So we've wrapped up another episode of Restoring the Soul. We want you to know that Restoring the Soul is so much more than a podcast. In fact, the heart of what we have done for nearly 20 years is intensive counseling. When you can't wait months or years to get out of the rut you're in, our intensive counseling programs in Colorado allow you to experience deep change in half day blocks over two weeks. To learn more, visit restoring the soul dot com. That's restoring the soul dot com.