60: Attachment-Based Identity (Part 2)

[00:07] Stephanie:Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Episode 60. Today we are continuing our look at attachment based identity.

Hello, Father.

[00:28] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to be talking attachment with you today.

[00:32] Stephanie: Yeah, I’m quite attached. I have another icebreaker courtesy of a listener. And also it feels appropriate because as we’re recording this, we’re still at our camp where we’re gonna have ice cream tonight. So the question here is sherbet or ice cream?

[00:50] Marcus: You know, for me it’s always been ice cream. I’ve only had sherbet a handful of times in my life. So the real question, I guess, would be soft serve or flavored, you know, scoop ice cream. Okay. For me, mom always loves the scoop flavored stuff. I have a soft spot in my heart, no pun intended, for soft serve ice cream. I think it goes back to the days when Dairy Queen was a super treat and it was just a rare thing that, something about that, I still like.

[01:24] Stephanie: Nah, you took the question deeper.

[01:27] Marcus: What to do?

[01:27] Stephanie: That’s good.

[01:29] Marcus: I don’t know enough about, you know, like gelato and sherbet and stuff.

[01:32] Stephanie: I know. Or I was like, froyo or ice cream?

[01:36] Marcus: Frozen yogurt? Yeah, basically, if it’s got sugar, I’ll eat it.

[01:39] Stephanie: So, yeah, I was gonna say I wouldn’t turn either of them down, but yes, I would go ice cream. And I’m excited for our ice cream tonight. You and mom are actually gonna help take it out at the snack shack tonight and help people get their ice cream. So it’s gonna be great scooping.

All right, well, last episode we started talking about attachment-based identity and looked at how our brains have three internal faces that work to form our identity. We mentioned that there is hope for repair and people who didn’t get what they needed in their attachments and identity formation. And in this episode, we’re gonna push into that hope.

So, Father, how identity forms in the brain. Is there more you wanna talk about?

[02:29] Marcus: Yes, how it forms in the brain. I thought this might actually be a good opportunity to review some of the things that Chris and I wrote in our book, The Four Habits of Raising Joy-Filled Kids, because that’s really the point. How does somebody form a healthy, stable, emotional identity in the next generation?

Because that book’s not about how do we raise kids who are happy all the time, it’s about how do we raise emotionally resilient kids. An emotionally resilient kid is somebody who’s going to have a stable identity and be really good at their affect regulation. We take the four habits there, and we use ABCD to explain them. It doesn’t spell a word like usually, but we have the ABCD, and it starts with the kids.

ABCD is fun for kids, but this is not a kid word. “A” is attunement. The idea behind attunement, I would put it this way, is that one mistake that a lot of parents make is that they expect their kids to attune to their emotions rather than being the grown up who’s attuning to the child’s emotion.

A classic example would be I come into a room and I’m upset, and I expect the child to notice how upset I am and adjust their behavior to reading me.  Or I come in and I’m craving attachment, and I want to be with them, and I expect them to notice how much I’m wanting to be lovey and huggy right now and to adjust to me.

One of the problems that we run into is that we don’t attune to the child’s emotional state. We expect the child to attune to our emotional state. So habit number one for building a strong identity is that we have to get really good attuning to the child.

This is especially true for babies. That is, you don’t build joy with babies on your schedule. You have to build it on their schedule. The idea here is that a healthy, stable identity is going to be a joy-based identity. So we’ve got to do joy workouts in order to help people grow this kind of an identity. Because you think about if the three faces are an adoring mother, a delighted baby, and a delighted father who’s watching all of this happening, then I need that experience to take place on a regular basis.

We call those joy workouts. When I have joy workouts and mommy and baby are doing this stuff all day long, and then when daddy comes home he gets to share in the joy, you have an identity that develops well. We can replicate that a little bit through joy workouts that we do. But it starts with attuning, and attuning has to do with noticing where the other person is at in their emotional state, meeting them there, as opposed to expecting them to read your emotional state and meet you where you are. This happens a lot. It doesn’t have to take a long time either. This is very similar to validating.

And I know we have a cat who just walked into the room and is now..

[05:39] Stephanie: He’s looking for ways that he can jump into Dad’s lap.

[05:41] Marcus: Yeah, I’m not sure what specifically…

[05:41] Stephanie: I think he wants in the window.

[05:43] Marcus: That would make sense. Okay.

[05:46] Stephanie:If we hear a thunk, that is why.

[05:47] Marcus: Yeah, if you hear cats in the background, you’ll know what’s going on.

So when we attune to people, what we’re doing is we’re reading their body language and we’re taking a moment to recognize the situation we’re walking into. And again, I go back to the parent who walks into a room and finds their child doing something that maybe they’re playing, or maybe they’re upset about something, or maybe they’re watching TV, and all I know is I’m angry because I told them to go do something else, and they’re not doing it. I still need to take a moment to attune to read the situation, see where they’re at, meet them there, and then move them to where I want them to go.

Attuning is a very important habit. It has to do with reading body language, has to do with getting in sync, so we need to practice attuning to each other. That’s one of the skills that helps us grow a stable identity.

The second one, the “B”, is building bounce. Stephanie Hinman and I obviously wrote a book by that title. The idea of building bounce is it’s a different kind of joy workout. It’s got two elements to it. One is me and you sharing, building joy together. The classic thing I always think of is peekaboo. “Peekaboo! Look, it’s you!” and getting the baby to giggle and you’re sharing joy smiles, and the baby gets bouncing and very happy, and then all of a sudden, we’ll just stop. That means they need a break.

What I’m doing, though, is I’m trying to attune to the baby to see when they’re ready to build some joy and the clue to that is they’re looking for eye contact. They’re looking at you. They’re looking for eye contact. So that’s your clue. “Okay, I see where you’re at. Let’s stop everything. Let’s build some joy together right now.”

Building joy together is step one of building bounce. Step two is me attuning to you and realizing that you’re not in the mood to build joy, that you were upset about something, you may be shut down and sad, or you’re overwhelmed and scared. So I want to attune to where you’re at emotionally, meet you there, and then Validate, Comfort, Recover, use the VCR process, to help you get back to a place of where you’re within your margin again, back within that window of tolerance we talked about in the last series.

So attuning leads directly to building bounce. And those two things work together to help people grow that joy foundation that creates a joyful identity.

[08:33] Stephanie: Do you want to mention self-regulation versus co-regulation?

[08:38] Marcus: Yes. At the infant level of this, babies can’t do any of this for themselves. They are completely dependent upon the parent to do the attuning because a baby has no ability to attune, and a baby can’t spontaneously create their own joy. They have to feed off of that. You can’t tell a baby to calm down or stop doing this, or change. We have to actually walk them through the process of doing it. We call that external regulation. I’ve forgotten the term, but it’s like I’ve got to regulate for the baby.

Then when I get to the child stage, now we do what’s called co-regulation, and that’s where we’re working on it together. I’m training you. I’m helping you. I’m walking you through it. So in the infant stage, I do it for you. At the child stage, we do it together. I help you practice it so that by the time I’m an adult, I can self regulate. I know how to get myself out of these moods and these states that I’m in because I’ve had lots of practice with it.

[09:48] Stephanie: All right, helpful. So the ABC, correct?

[09:52] Marcus: Yes, we’re moving now, for the “A”, and the “B” are largely the right brain parts of this, and then we’re moving into the left brain. But you can’t do the left brain parts without the right brain included. So everything always starts with attunement, and then you go to building bounce, and then you go to “C”, correcting with care.

And the idea on correcting with care is that you have to do attunement and building bounds first before you do the correction. Again, too many times, as parents, we lead with correction. We lead with our upset about what you’re doing, and we get angry with the kid. And what our children learn is simply, they learn what makes us mad. They don’t actually get their behavior corrected and so they learn to hide things because they don’t want us to get mad. It trains them in a way that we actually don’t want to train them.

To correct with care means I start with attunement and I build bounce, and then I go to correcting behavior. A classic example of this would be the terrible twos. Around 18 months of age, for the first time, there are hormones going through the brain that can feel extreme emotion. So instead of just feeling anger, I can feel rage. That’s why your adorable little two year old can say, “I hate you. I wish you were dead.” And you’re like, where did that come from? Well, they’re having huge emotions. And so if I say, “Well, we don’t talk like that here,” and I go straight to correcting them, and I don’t take the time to attune and read what’s going on with them, help them recover emotionally, and then go to correction, I’m probably gonna end up doing more harm than good, because most of what happens at the terrible twos is not really about behavior. It is about emotional regulation.

And so what we need to focus on at that stage is meeting them in their upsetting emotions, helping them return to joy from those upsetting emotions, and then following that up with whatever correction is still needed once they have recovered. What you realize is an awful lot of behavioral problems in children is happening because they can’t regulate their emotions. So if we can help them learn to regulate their emotions, it’s going to go a long way to helping them improve their behavior.

That’s why we got to keep the order. It goes “A”, and then “B”, and then “C”, and that has to stay that way throughout. So those are the ABCs.  We get to “D”, my “D” is about developing disciplines relationally. So, “relationally” is kind of the key word there. I would sometimes put it this way, that the key to success in life is discipline. You’ve got to develop a certain level of discipline in order to succeed. And so, as a parent, I have to teach my children discipline.

Now, the Bible talks about this in terms of wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to distinguish what’s good from what’s evil and the discipline to do the good. And so if I distinguish between what is good and what is evil, another way to put that is I’m going to distinguish between what’s good for me and what’s going to end well and what’s going to end badly. And that’s wisdom. It’s discernment. I can distinguish between those.

And the discipline that I’m trying to teach my child is related to this. So the Hebrew word for wisdom is “chokmah”, which can also be translated skill. And so in this sense, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to teach our kids skills. Now, we all know this, right? We do potty training. That’s a skill. We teach them how to feed themselves as a skill, how to dress themselves, how to make their beds.

But there are emotional skills. We have to teach them how to validate and comfort and recover. There are a lot of different relational skills that we teach through modeling, through correcting, through all the rest. There’s also just life skills and how to enjoy working for things, how to learn how to work hard for and wait for things. Like, let’s work on this, and then let’s wait, and let’s plant these seeds and water it and then in a few months, we’re going to see it grow. I think that, and not even just sometimes, just in a couple of days to a couple of weeks, they can watch and gradually learn some patience.

So you look at all these things, and the more that I do that relationally, I am building memories now where there is joy in the attachment because they can look back and remember learning this skill and learning this thing and how much joy there was relationally in that process of learning the skill. Those are the ABCDs of how we build a joyful identity and how, as parents, we pass this down to our kids to give them the best chance to grow this kind of a stable, attachment based identity.

[14:40] Stephanie: So, good. So what happens if your kids are grown up? Or what happens if you yourself are grown up and you didn’t get these joy workouts? Is there hope? What does it look like to repair as an adult?

[14:53] Marcus: So what happens is, if I realize I did not raise my kids this way. I talked to a lot of grandparents who are like, “I’m buying this book for my grandkids because I did not raise my kids this way.” If I realize I didn’t do this with the kids the way I wanted to, or I didn’t get this or something in there, this is where, honestly, going through this book is about more than parenting. It helps us see some of the holes that we have and understand where we need to put some work.

Now, the book that’s going to help you do more of the work will either be the book Building Bounce, or it will be The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People. Building Bounce is probably where I would start with Christians. The Four Habits of Joy-Filled People is more meant to be something that you give to your non-Christian family member who doesn’t want the Bible in their face, whereas Building Bounce is for the Christian who wants to use all of the tools and resources available to the Christian.

We have listening prayer in there. We’ve got some spiritual warfare in there. But the ABCs of building bounce are “A” is practicing appreciation and quieting. And those are the two foundational skills on which all emotional regulation is based. If I want to learn to regulate my own emotions, that’s where I’m struggling, then I need to start disciplining myself in the areas of building the practices of quieting and appreciating.

We’ve got lots of exercises in there. We’ve had other podcasts on this. I think people understand quieting the body, getting my mind in a place of appreciation for five minutes at a time, then doing this multiple times a day as I begin to establish this habit and retraining my brain to live this way. So that’s the “A” of building bounce.

The “B” is beliefs. If the foundation of all emotional stability is the attachment, things of appreciation and quieting, then the next level is beliefs. And that is, the fastest way to lose my emotional stability is by what I believe. If I believe things about you that make me so mad, or I believe things about you that just have me so worked up, I just hate those people. I just don’t want anything to do with them.

I know people like that who, when they watch the evening news, you just watch them getting angrier and angrier, or more and more afraid. You watch people who will get the wrong idea, they get disgusted with certain people, and they just feel a level of disgust that they’re reacting to because their beliefs about the person are building those emotions.

And so we have to learn how to take our thoughts captive, how to do this battle for the mind. And so we have a lot of tools and resources about the battle for the mind and taking thoughts captive and replacing the thought, the toxic thoughts, with the thoughts that actually God wants us to be thinking. So lots of tools in the book about that.

Then “C” is connections. And the idea is, I can’t stay isolated and do this successfully. I have to have places where I can practice some of these skills. Some people are like, “Well, I quit right there because I’m so isolated. I don’t have anybody.” So one of the places to start is just make a list of everybody that you see in the course of a week and begin asking, who do I see every day? Who do I see every week? Who do I see at least this month? And then find a way to add a little bit of joy into that relationship and start there.

We have to begin building some connections, and so it’s connections with other people and our connection with God. And again, for a lot of us, God is not a safe person. He is more scary than he is comforting. And if that’s you, then I would recommend a book like Alaine Pakkala’s book, Taking Every Thought Captive book which is specifically addressing that issue of my life experiences have taught me not to trust God. So let’s start at ground zero and try to build a positive view of God from the bottom up. And that would be her book, Taking Every Thought Captive.

So that’s the ABCs. I just covered two books in one podcast. There may be more than that, but you get the idea that there are ways to do these things, ways to pass them on, and there are ways to repair them if you didn’t get them. That’s the overview of how that works.

[19:23] Stephanie: Yes, there is hope. Do you want to tie some of this into the levels of maturity?

[19:33] Marcus: Sure. If you go back to the Life Model, there are six levels of maturity, actually, because the first one is in utero. There are developmental things that are happening from conception to birth. And then there is the infant stage. At the infant stage, essentially, I can’t do anything for myself. I need somebody else to do all of it. And so as a parent, what I give to my child in that infant stage is super important to their brain development, to their attachment development, to laying that emotionally stable foundation for life.

When we get to the child level, now the focus there is wisdom. I can sometimes think of infant level as the grace stage of life, and that is, I am going to get everything that I need without having to do anything to earn it. That’s Grace. And the other way of thinking about grace is I am special without having to do anything, I just show up, and I am special. That’s what’s supposed to happen for infants is they know that they are special just because they’ve shown up. They’re going to get all of their needs taken care of just because they exist. That’s Grace.

You get into the child stage and you’re starting to develop wisdom. And at this stage, I am learning to distinguish between: this is going to end well, and this is going to end badly; this is worth working for and waiting for, this isn’t so much; this is just temporarily pleasurable. I’m learning what is wise, that wisdom is the good life. This will lead to the good life, this won’t.

Biblically speaking, the fool is the one who argues with God about what the good life is and how to get there. So with our kids, we’re trying to help them not be fools. We’re trying to help them be wise and learn to stay on a path that actually is going to lead them to the good life that they’re looking for.

Then when we get to the adult years, my primary connections begin to change to my peers. What happens here is that if I have developmental holes in my infant and childhood development, then when I get to those teenage years, I am more likely to bond to the wrong people, because I’m going to bond with other people who have the same holes in their maturity. I don’t tend to bond to people who are farther along than I am. I tend to bond to people who are stuck in the same places as me.

This is one of the reasons why we want to try to help, at each stage, help kids become fully mature for their stage as they go to the next. And in the adult years, as a parent, I am less of a commanding presence, and I am more of a coach. I’m more of a listener and an advice giver. I’m trying to help them be the problem solver in their own life and not just solve all of their problems for them. And that continues on.

Beyond that, then it’s the parent stage, where that’s the role I’m now playing. And then I get to the elder stage, where my kids are the age where they could have families of their own. They can begin doing things at another level. But the point is they’re now independent. They’re all adults. They can handle life themselves. I’m there as a companion. I’m more of a friend at this stage of life, and we are interacting at that level. So those are the six stages, the in utero, the infant, the child, adult, parent and elder.

[23:00] Stephanie: Well, and keeping it really specific too, I was just thinking with the elder level, that’d be like the parent of the community stage.

[23:07] Marcus: Yes, at some level I’m parenting the whole community. Another point, what happens is I’m now in a position to help fill holes. When there are people who got missed and they really need to be reparented, I can kind of serve as a surrogate parent for some of those people, take them under my wing. Whereas if I do that too early on, and I’m taking too many people under my wing when I’m supposed to be raising my own kids , sometimes that can become a challenge. But in the elder years, I should have plenty of opportunity to do that.

[23:37] Stephanie: Well, and as you were talking, it reminded me, I think last episode you mentioned how sometimes people will go through track one at Thrive Today and think, “Oh, well, this is so basic.” And other people are like, “Oh, I really needed this!” And some of that is because if you have those holes at the infant level, then you are getting repaired, going all the way back, and then you build from there up.

[24:02] Marcus: Exactly. And that’s why there are repairs. Understanding what needs to be happening at each stage of maturity helps us know where the repairs need to be taking place on our journey. And again, still to this day, the best book I know on that is Living From the Heart Jesus Gave You.

[24:18] Stephanie: Mm hmm. That’s good.

All right, I’m going to pause and pull in a note of encouragement from one of our listeners. This is from Lois. She says,

I was a, quote unquote, dumb kid. Youngest, lol, and pretty gullible. Yes. My older brothers fooled me with the snipe hunt thing. So I’ve grown up to be kind of skeptical. At first I was suspicious of all the brain science stuff, but over and over now I see it being validated in my experiences. Just this last week, I was at an older ladies’ gathering and the video we watched never mentioned the pain processing pathway, it was on lamentational prayer, but it followed the same steps. 

And there was so much about this note of encouragement that I loved. One, Lois, I totally get the feeling of being gullible. I grew up wanting to believe the best in people, but when they don’t show you their best sometimes, yeah, skepticism and cynicism. I also love that you were doing a gathering on lamentational prayer. I want to know more about that. If you’re listening, email me. I want to know what that was. I’m currently studying some of that. That’s really cool.

[25:33] Marcus: Oh, I was just saying Jeremiah’s your favorite prophet, so yes, that would make sense indeed.

[25:41] Stephanie: But, yes. Thank you. Thank you for sharing with us.

And for the rest of our listeners, if you want to share your thoughts or questions, feel free to email me. On my Monday emails, I have a button, even as a form that you can click on and it just lets you share. And you can share if you want, if you’re okay with me saying your name on the air or if you want to be anonymous or anything like that, you can share your feedback. And we love to hear from you.

So, Father, we’re kind of coming up to the end of the episode. We’ve been talking about attachment and brain science, and we are going to start moving into beliefs next episode. Is there anything else you want to make sure we cover on the brain science side of things?

[26:28] Marcus: I think back to my own childhood and my mind goes to my mom and to my dad and to how they connected to life and seeing the patterns that were established in my life early on, and how many of those things had nothing to do with beliefs. They had nothing to do with our theology. They had nothing to do with what we believed about God in Christ.

They had everything to do with how we had learned to interact with each other. And so what I realized is that I’m still filling holes from some of those things. I look at their lives and I realize the holes that they had because of the families they grew up in. And you begin to understand that for most of us, we’re going to spend our whole lives filling holes from things that we missed in our maturity development.

This isn’t like you take a class on it, you work on it for a week and I’m done, I’m back up to where I should be on my maturity. This is more of a lifelong journey, more of a lifelong process. It’s something we’re always looking at, working at, but what we want to do, I believe that God always has a growth edge in our lives at any given time, and what we want to pay attention to is God. Where’s the growth edge for me right now?

Not, how do I fix everything, how do I get all better all at once? It’s just, where’s my growth edge this week? Where do you want to be working? And let’s do this together, like you can be my dad. Let’s have a relational bond as we develop these new disciplines together and go from there. So ask God where is the growth edge you want to be working on for me right now?

[28:04] Stephanie: Huzzah. Going deeper together with God. I love it.

Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us on the trail today. Deeper walk exists to make heart-focused discipleship the norm for Christians everywhere. If you’d like to support this cause, you can become a Deeper Walk Trailblazer with your monthly donation of $25 or more.

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