Feeling Felt

Human beings are not wired for productivity or achievement—they are wired for connection. Yet modern life increasingly disrupts that foundation, leaving many navigating stress, trauma, and fragmentation without the relational systems the nervous system depends on.

In this conversation, Mary Schaub speaks with psychologist Dr. Megan Schmidt about connection as a biological process—rooted in co-regulation, implicit memory, and the body’s ongoing “conversation” with others. At the center is attunement—the experience of “feeling felt”—as both the origin of development and the pathway to healing.

✅ Key Topics

•  Co-regulation as the foundation of human development 
•  Attachment, implicit memory, and early nervous system formation 
•  Misattunement and adult patterns (hypervigilance, collapse, self-doubt) 
•  Attunement and “feeling felt” as mechanisms for growth and repair 
•  Rupture and repair beyond apology 
•  Over-attunement (“fawning”) and boundaries as regulation 

💡Takeaways

•  Connection is biological, not optional 
•  The body encodes experience before conscious awareness 
•  Attunement organizes identity, emotion, and meaning 
•  Repair is relational, not verbal 
•  Regulation cannot be achieved through cognition alone 

🎤 Memorable Quotes

• “We are mammals… designed to co-regulate… in a body-to-body conversation.” — Dr. Megan Schmidt
•  “Our body tells a different story than the one we can explain.” — Dr. Megan Schmidt
•  “Behaviors that seem problematic are often adaptations.” — Dr. Megan Schmidt
•  “You can’t think your way into this—you have to feel it.” — Mary Schaub

🔗Resources

•  Gabor Maté — https://drgabormate.com
•  Bessel van der Kolk — https://www.besselvanderkolk.com
•  Still Face Experiment — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0
• NICABM — https://www.nicabm.com
•  Polyvagal Theory — https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org
  
  

co-regulation, attachment theory, trauma, nervous system, emotional regulation, attunement, relational psychology, developmental trauma, neuroplasticity, recursion, identity patterns, dissociation, polycrisis, leadership psychology, somatics, consciousness, human connection, behavioral health, systems thinking, transformation

Disclaimer:

***The information, opinions, and recommendations presented in this Podcast are for general information only and any reliance on the information provided in this Podcast is done at your own risk. This Podcast should not be considered professional advice.***

Credits: Written, produced and hosted by: Mary Schaub. Theme song written by: Mary Schaub

Contact: FractalsofChange@outlook.com  

Website: M. Schaub Advisory (MSA)

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Today I sat down with Dr. Megan Schmidt, who is a psychologist in private practice and an instructor with the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. She teaches clinicians how to work with trauma, attachment, and the nervous system. Her work centers on a fundamental question. How do our earliest experiences shape the way we move through the world? Megan brings both clinical depth and practical clarity. She understands that the patterns we carry, anxiety, reactivity, disconnection, are often rooted in early developmental environments where co-regulation and attunement shape not just how we feel, but how we learn to relate, trust, and perceive safety itself. In this episode, we explore how those early relational dynamics become embedded in the nervous system, how they show up later in our relationships, our decisions, and sense of self, and what it takes to begin working with them, not through force, but through awareness, regulation, and integration. Here's where we begin. Our basic programming as human beings isn't productivity, it isn't achievement, it isn't even success, it's connection. But today we live in a very different environment. We're more digitally connected than any generation in history, yet many people report feeling profoundly alone. Relationships are increasingly mediated through screens, attention is fragmented, community structures have weakened. And people are often navigating stress, trauma, and uncertainty without the kinds of support systems humans evolved with. If connection is our deepest biological and psychological need, what happens to individuals when the need is consistently disrupted or unmet?

SPEAKER_00 2:17

If our needs for connection are not met or are met in a fragmented way. And that can show up in a lot of different ways because everyone's body and experience in their body and of their nervous system is different. But I think we're all walking around in some form of dysregulation if we're not getting our needs for connection met.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

When we use the word connection, we often use it to mean relationship or emotion, but neurologically, connection begins at birth. Can you explain what co-regulation is, both biologically and psychologically?

SPEAKER_00 2:56

When I first hear that question, the first thing I think of, and something I say to my clients routinely as they begin therapy, just to ground them in this framework, is we are mammals and we are biologically designed and enervated to co-regulate. It means that every moment of every day we are engaged in a body-to-body conversation with the beings around us. And we are constantly in this subcortical, you know, it's not about thoughts, it's not about thinking, body dance with other people. And it starts with baby and caregiver. And something I talk with clients about also is that of all mammals, human babies come out with the least developed nervous system, which is a little, it's a little staggering. Like our time with caregivers before we can uh go off and explore the world is the longest in the mammal world. Like you think of prey eatimals and fawns or little calves that are dropped in the open grasslands and they can spring up and evade a predator right away. That's not the human infant. The human infant needs so much skin-to-skin regulation, co-regulation with the caregiver to regulate its body temperature, its heart rate, its breathing, and all of those kind of physiological systems to be able to stay regulated. And I think that's really powerful to think about and how our earliest touch memory, we can't know this with the thinking part of our brain. But if we're, I've said this to clients and I've said it very sensitively because some people may have enormously disrupted relationships with their caregivers, like neglect or trauma or abandonment. But if if we are here today, we're alive, we were held enough, we were cared for enough by someone, maybe not even the primary caregiver, maybe someone stepped in. But I will say it's most likely that our earliest touch memory, and our brain won't know it, but our body will, is being held, and most likely, um, think about that position for human infants, skin to skin, right at the chest.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

There was recently a viral video of a monkey named Punch. I don't know if you saw this or you've heard of it. He was abandoned and rejected by his mother and subsequently all the other monkeys. And then they gave him a stuffed animal, little monkey. And of course, in the age of cell phones, there's tons of videos of him both being rejected and then just completely connected to this little toy. And now reports are that he's been improving socially ever since. So it reminded me, going back to my university days, of the Harry Harlow's attachment experiments. So as you were talking about this skin to skin and our nervous system and how critical this is, I was thinking about just contact comfort and the role that it plays in early attachment and development and ultimately, I'm assuming, personality and who we are.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Yeah. Hard to draw like a one-to-one, I don't know the studies or the science, like the one-to-one correlation of how does our personality develop from that. But I know all of our implicit memory, our felt memory in our body, not accessed by our thinking brain, but accessed through sensing and feeling and that whole imprint that is there through our adult lives that influences how we feel around other people, is largely formed in those very formative years where we're highly co-regulating with a caregiver. Now we're always co-regulating, but we need it intensely when we're little infants and we can't control our respiration and all those things I was talking about before. When I'm thinking about co-regulation, it's not just touch, it's all those things that caregiver and infant do if we're lucky enough to experience this. The cooing, that kind of, oh, there's a word a lot of attachment theorists use, reciprocity. It's that thinking about co-regularing, of making noises and faces and mirroring is another term you'll hear attachment theorists use. That all of those things are very critical in the development of a regulated nervous system and being able to um healthily co-regulate because we can also co-reg co-regulate with others. That's simple that doesn't necessarily the word co-regulate doesn't have directionality implied where it's always positive co-regulation. Sure. Co-regulating can be there's two very disrupted or dysregulated nervous systems.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Um it's the vibes, right? We can see in your experience, do you see people with a range of sensitivity? And does that connect into some of the experiences and patterns they might have had? Is it positively or negatively correlated?

SPEAKER_00 8:49

With early experience.

unknown 8:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

It's hard, it's hard to prove to a one because we can't go back and necessarily observe and know what did and didn't happen in those early years. But to answer the first part of the question, absolutely, when I think about people in my life, my own family members, myself, not to mention clients, I think I see a real range of sensitivity to co-regulating with others, aka picking up on vibes. And you'll hear people say self-identify in all these different ways, like highly sensitive person, right? Is a term we hear, or introvert, or people who say, I feel the feelings of other people. I get really overwhelmed when I'm around other people. I'm I'm overcome with what I sense their emotions are. So that may be a kind of one extreme of the continuum. And I think we all have interacted with people who seem relatively unaffected by other people's mood states and so much of our early environment and things that are again, our thinking brain may not remember, but our body is the repository for all those felt experiences. And that gets into implicit memory. There's our explicit kind of autobiographical memory where we can say, This happened to me when I was this age, and here are these major events, and I lived here and I moved there, and this is the arc of my life, and I'll talk about that with clients. So there's a story that we can tell about ourselves, but our body tells a different story, but it's implicit memory. It's what is learned, it's what's learned procedurally or implicitly, which is below the thinking mind. Think about driving a car. When you get in a car, say I've got to depress my foot on the pedal a millimeter right now and turn my wrist this many degrees. It just happens. And our attachment behavior and our co-regulation with other beings is procedurally or implicitly learned, where it is automatic. Anything that we have to do over and over and over and over again will go from our working memory, which is five to seven seconds long, into short-term memory, and then eventually we'll go into our procedural or implicit memory. And it's all kinds of things, like even patterns of eye contact. There's really interesting research that later in life, how comfortable we are maintaining gaze or not can be about early learning with how much gazing was invited by a caregiver, how dysregulated that caregiver may have looked or not looked. And so all of our attachment behaviors, eye contact, how um our voice, our affect, how close or distant we are from people, our posture, our overall level of arousal when we're with other people can be part of our implicit or procedural learning. And it's the job of therapy to make some of those patterns explicit through different interventions to see if there's some learning, new learning that can happen. So insights about the self, but then maybe some new patterning. It's like, why do I always feel anxious with people? Or why do I immediately feel agitated if someone seeks connection? Or why do I constantly feel sad when someone leaves? These kinds of patterns are procedurally learned.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

That is so fascinating. I recently spoke to a guest. We were talking about dysregulation came up, and I used the road raid ex ray road rage example. It's one of those triggers for me that I would love to not be that person, but I am. And he just happened to have the same one. And he said, I remember as a little boy watching my father. He's a very calm, even-tempered man. But when he got in the car, he was someone else. And I am now the same way. So it's interesting, as you were talking, I was also thinking about how these patterns then end up being passed down and then become part of this ancestral lineage. And in companies, we call it the culture, but it ends up being the norms of the family.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

And if you don't have other friends or distant relatives who act differently, you think that's how the world is. You think it's just how things are. I know you do a lot of somatic work. I had a personal experience. When I was two, I fell down the stairs. And something around, I was like probably 15, 16 years ago, I was, I think I was walking down the stairwell. We were all rushing for a train. And I almost re-relived having that feel feeling in my body. I felt like I was falling down the stairs. I've read Bessel Vanderkoelk's Body Keeps the Score, recognizing that there's a percentage of what's held in our body that we'll ever come to truly understand. In your work, you're helping people recognize it that it's there and then draw those connections. If they ask you, is it okay to care for it? Oh, please do.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Yeah, I really want to interact with that anecdote. For example, is that is the falling when you were two, something that you somehow re-remember with your analytical brain, your autobiographical, or where you have, I'm assuming you were you had to be told.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

I had to be told.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

Yeah, that's a and we'll talk about that a lot with therapy with people. It's okay. That's not an explicit memory. It's something you had to be told about your autobiography. And yet, knowing that you have a hypothesis, and I bet you're right on that what you whatever you felt there in Penn Station, you know, that it was something bigger.

SPEAKER_01 15:04

You know how there people explain that there's the there's that one term that when it's hysterical, it's historical. This wasn't hysterical, but it was that sort of experience where I've done enough work that I understand that this isn't the now.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Yes, exactly. This is yeah, that's a big concept and working with trauma in the nervous system is you know, you can think of a traumatic event. And that is a traumatic event, falling and being out of control of your body and being little. There's the feeling of being out of control in your body and the potential for catastrophic harm, and there's the relational piece of where's the adults and where's the kids and who who's responding? You just said it out loud, as we kind of had a moment there of this feels like it's in the now, but it doesn't belong here. And people can feel crazy, they can feel out of control, they can feel shame. It's what is this experience I'm having? And a lot of the work in therapy um is a in the beginning is psychoeducation, just like why does our body do what it does? I always say you're not sick, you're not bad, you're not crazy. I'm gonna make three uh positive assumptions here. Can we agree on that together? And then can we get curious? And can I tell you some things I know about the body and the nervous system? We can think about trauma as a memory disorder. It's the imposition of the past on the present. But because our body sensations are only ever experienced in the now, um, or heart racing or anxious feeling, or we're getting hot or tingly, we think it's right now. But the body remembers and sensations and feelings and arousal states, and it's very tricky for us. Unless someone sits us down and explains basic neurobiology, how would we know that is our body remembering something from the past? So that piece of psychoeducation can be pretty profound for people.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Yeah, just feel like their body's taking them on a ride all over the place and they wonder what's wrong with me. And it's like your body's really sane and it's remembering, and it's we and we may not know. We may not know you were able to be told what happened at two, but a lot of times clients are having experiences in their bodies that are very disturbing, and we can't go back in time and know exactly what it was. So we have to do a lot of real gentle framing of we may not be able to do some kind of fact-finding mission and know exactly what was there, but we can make this good faith assumption. If your body is having this experience right now, then it was encoded that way in the past. And it may not have been anything anyone around you intended, but it that is what how it got encoded, and that's what we're gonna work with. So there's a truth to what the body holds, even if we can't go back and square that with the family reckoning or facts at that time.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

There was another viral video that really moved me. It was of a little four-year-old boy who must have just had a meltdown of some kind. The video is the aftermath where he's sitting in bed and the mother sitting by his side, and he's very calmly explaining to her how, yeah, I had lost my temper. And I was mad. And he was really articulating his meltdown. It was just, it was really remarkable to see a child like that be able to put words that many even adults sometimes we struggle to do. But what I really found remarkable was his mother. She was just very calm by his side and she was making eye contact and she was letting him speak as much as she wanted, but then periodically she would reflect his words back to him. She wasn't rushing him. And then she would just gently help him reframe his point of view or help solidify his self-reflections. And I thought, oh wow, this kid's gonna do great. This is what we all should have had, right? Ideally, this would be wonderful. Very, I'm guessing very few of us, certainly I didn't have that experience, but what a different experience it would be to grow up in a world where you had that internal coherence at four. And then what happens between four and adulthood, those experiences must be so different. I'm guessing, I'm guessing some of this comes up in in the work that you do. And I'm wondering why the process of that mirroring and naming is so important.

SPEAKER_00 19:50

Yeah, that's that that's an example of really beautiful co-regulation. Good co-regulation, like that mom is giving that child, can really help with that internal sense of coherence because pieces are attunement, and I'll talk about that a little more in a moment, and the mirroring and being social beings and having this nervous system that is largely grown through this interactive co-regulatory dance with caregivers, we're exquisitely sensitive to all those cues. So, going back to the human infants having the least developed nervous system of all mammals, it's 30% enervated when we're born. So the rest of our nervous system is literally growing through that dance with caregivers. So attunement, feeling felt, that's my definition of attunement. So it's wonderful. Yeah, I think it's so important to feel felt. It's the mother is maybe repeating some words, you know. You oh, so it was like this, yeah, okay, yes, and then what? But really, the magic is in moving in close and communicating with prosody. There's like some research and theory on the use of prosody, which is like the rhythm and tonality of our voice, can be really co-regulating and our affect and our body language. So it's really how we are communicating with our whole being that we are interested, we are available. Attuning also has a mirroring in it. So helping someone feel felt. It's someone, if that little boy is saying it was mad. It's like, yeah, you were mad. Mad you can see in my face or hear in my voice for a moment. Matching that we want to match in a slightly more regulated form to help someone else's nervous system potentially drop. Um, I'll do a little experiment with clients and I'll say, okay, imagine that you come in and you're really hurt and activated and agitated about something that happens, and I talk to you like this, and Miri, you can see what happens in your body when I do this. Oh wow. Mary. Probably doesn't feel good. I don't know what happened. You can tell me what happened there, but imagine being agitated.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

Does that feel good?

SPEAKER_01 22:48

Yeah, it doesn't. And I'm imagining if you were too if you also got upset or angry, it would also there really is this calibration of yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

There's a calibration, but if you were upset and you told me this really distressing thing happened to me, and I met you in a slightly more regulated form. So I'm I'm not as activated or more. I'm also not too calm. I have a little firmness in my voice, and I'm a little emphatic and say, that's really upsetting. That's awful. Yeah. Okay, tell me more. That makes me have a reaction too, right now.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

It's interesting because we speak, I'm guilty of it, but so much of what you're saying, it's encoded in every sentence, every interaction. No, I think about the first thing I'm on the train and the ticket, something happens. Like you went, you go to sit down, is this seat taken? There's some this exchange that you're you're talking about is happening. We're sending these signals out all the time. And just by bringing awareness to it, first of all, being awareness in ourselves, because like you were saying, like maybe there's a scenario where I'm sure it happens, you're very tired, you're meeting with a client and it's something's going on with you because you're human. And maybe you wanted you want to match that, but for some reason it it's off. That person might pick up on it. And so even someone as trained and experienced as you are are very aware of the impact of this. But most of us are walking around all day long, just energy in and energy out, without really paying much attention to it. And it is so powerful. The example of being on the train, everyone has this thing where you put your bag next to you, you don't want people to sit next to you. And then as the train fills up, you someone comes by and they're looking sheepish and apologetic that they have to ask you to pick up the bag and just how you react to them. Some people kind of cluck and are annoyed and pick up their bag. And then sometimes you just smile. And the quality of that interaction for the rest of the train ride is going to be totally different. Now that's a very benign and banal example, but you think about all the opportunities we have throughout the day with all of our relationships. And then you're talking about people who have had experiences early on where maybe their early caregiver was very frustrated when they brought anger, sadness, or any kind of emotion. And so that's coming into the interaction with the other person.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

And yeah, you're absolutely right that in a psychotherapy space, we're hopefully bringing trained intentionality to that body-to-body dance with a client. But that does not mean that I'm always perfectly attuning and part of my training. We'll feel it in our body. If I don't attune to a client, I'll feel something in their reaction back to me. And in my training, it is important to look at that space between the therapist and the client. So I might pause and say something like, hey, I think something just happened there, and I think I might have missed you. And then I'll just pause and see if there's some kind of confirmation and invite discussion. Because the other part of attunement is we're not going to do it perfectly. We're walking around in bodies that are reacting and getting triggered all day long, um, mostly outside of conscious awareness. We have this huge right brain and somatosensory cortex, and any fragment of a smell, a sound, a taste could trigger some kind of reaction in our nervous system. And we don't even know that just happened. And then we try to make a cognitive attribution, and it's usually I'm bad, you're bad, or our relationship is bad. Yeah. Right. And we don't even really, we can't really like perceive our own neurobiology and why we're feeling triggered, but we come up with those explanations. So I'm not always gonna attune perfectly, but being able to name that with someone, and we don't just have to do this in psychotherapy, we can try to do this with loved ones, and we can even do this with people that aren't that close to us. And wouldn't that be radical to say, hey, I think I just something something just happened. I think I I missed you somehow. What's did I not get that right? Or am I not cluing in? And that opens up the gateway for potential repair. And I love talking about repair because our culture is so big on apologizing. And I will talk to my clients about okay, there's attunement and there's inevitable repair when we misattune. We're all gonna misattune, we're imperfect. And people think that repair is I'm sorry. And I actually think those words can be so distancing. Think about the first word in that phrase, it's I'm but self-referential. It's the opposite of attunement, it's the opposite of helping the other person feel felt, and it often doesn't land in a way in the other person's body where they feel seen. And so I will try to model as a therapist, oh, I missed you, and that looks like it did not feel good. That looks tough that I didn't get it. And nowhere in there are the words, I'm sorry, because then people often that can tap into old learning where we feel beholden to say, it's okay. How many of us have said automatic? It's okay, okay. But the feeling felt like, oh, that did not feel good, did it? I didn't get it. I missed you there. And that can feel so good to feel seen and cared for when someone says that.

SPEAKER_01 29:08

Oh, I thousands. There's the opportunity. I was so glad you brought this up as I wanted to get into rupture and repair as well, because I feel it's another aspect of what we're talking about, some of these foundational relational skills that we don't talk about. In my family, which was the case where people go into separate corners, there's a period of pouting, and then everything goes back to normal. There's no opportunity to reflect because I think for some people and some families, there's a good and a bad. Someone was right and a wrong. Instead of saying, oh, this was really curious what happened. I was, I'm really tired and I wasn't listening to your story. I'm aware of something that happened in me, and I'm also aware of how it reacted in you. And let's talk about that. You mentioned the space before, which I love, which is when you and I come together, there's the you and the me, and then there's the space between us. And we can be curious about that space, but often it ends up being this is what you've done to me, this is what's going on with you. And we don't really acknowledge that there's this third thing that we create together through our relationship, and then try to nurture and care that the relationship we tend to defend attack and counterattack.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

Um, definitely, and it's very cognitive. And today we're talking about the body, the nervous system, the that body-to-body communication and co-regulation. And when we tackle repair, the way I think our kind of Western Americanized culture does with this, I'm sorry, I meant this. It's all about, I want you to understand what I meant. It's extremely content-driven, very analytical. And that doesn't translate, I don't think, very well to a felt sense in a felt sense inside of I feel reconnected to you now. I feel seen, I feel felt, and it's that difference between that kind of uh we haven't brought up these terms yet, the top-down, which is like trying to change how we feel in our body through changing our thoughts. It's if I can get you to understand me, then you can feel different or we can feel different, versus bottom up, it's through the body, through changing our bodily state, we can feel more connected. So it's okay, maybe we use less words right now. It looks like something happened here that felt bad to both of us. And maybe it's moving in close and using touch, or okay, let's just sit and breathe here for a minute. That was tough. Like we really missed each other, and that's just it's a very different way of going about rupture and repair, disconnection and reconnecting. And it seems like we all need a lot of help with that in our culture.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

For sure. And you said something really important before, which is we can learn this through wonderful therapists like yourself who can model it. And we can do this with our friends or family, and and yes, even strangers. All we're all human, we'll all have triggers, but maybe there'll be moments where we're the calm one, where we can hold some space when someone else is not doing so well. I wanted to ask you when talking about attunement and children who maybe never fully developed the ability to identify their emotions and body states. What do you see later in the therapy room with those individuals as adults? What does chronic misattunment as a child look like as an adult? That's a good question.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

So one way that can manifest in adulthood is constant questioning of one's internal experience. Almost a hyper-vigilant beyond doubt, there might be a primary emotion. It's like this thing happened and I feel hurt. And then there's this, wait, is it okay to feel that? And lots of analytical thinking and lots of trying to figure out if that's an okay reaction to have. And sometimes caregivers would be horrified to know that you felt so misattuned to, but even parents that love and want their children can leave their children alone in high distress states because they're stressed out or they have a traumatized nervous system, or they're a single parent, or they're dealing with illness, or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And people I see who grow up in these types of environments do that, have that experience of hyper-vigilance about everything they think and feel, and can really collapse in on themselves. Like when I started tuning, something I see is there's it's so uncomfortable. Interesting. Yeah, it's really uncomfortable. It's like I might gently say, Well, that I can actually understand that, or I'll I'll validate it in some way, and it's so hard for them to take in, or it almost makes them more anxious. And I'll usually pause and do a piece of psycho ed at that moment and say fascinating about our nervous system is that when we get the missing experience, when we get the thing that we long for that we never had, and it might be, I wish I was understood, I wish my emotions were okay with people. Our nervous system, our brain and body are prediction machines. And if it's a new experience, that is very likely going to register as a threat. Anything that is unfamiliar registers somewhere on the threat spectrum for our nervous system. And so a lot of times when you offer in the psychotherapy space, but we can even think of it outside of there, a person, the missing experience, like I see you, or your emotions are okay with me. There's a more anxiety because it's like, what is this? I don't know what this is. I don't know this experience. And so that can be a really beautiful place to work because you can slow it down and you can make the intellectual connection, but then do kind of body-based exercises around trying to find ways to help them take it in. Like, how would you know if your body was taking it in? What does that feel like? How does your body telling you that you're taking something in? And also it's okay to not take it in. How maybe you only want to take in 5%? Or it can be powerful just to sit with someone who's like, I can't take that in. And it's like, you know what? That's okay with me. You don't owe me anything. Because that that can make them fold in on themselves. Now I'm being a bad client. Now I didn't take in the compliment. And people who grew up with chronic misattunment can feel that way. It's like, no, I haven't done the right thing for the other person. I'm not, I'm never right. No matter what I do, it's not okay.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

Wow. I'm imagining you have this tool that you're using yourself, your own nervous system in the room, and just with so much precision, using this insight to calibrate all these different methods of working with people. And that, but using the experience of being with them as a feedback to then adjust, probably from session to session, because things change. You know, maybe there's one day someone is comfortable doing that, something's accessible to them on one day that might not be accessible on another. So it sounds like you are in real time very dynamically changing your approaches. I'm curious, and you said something about big T and attachment trauma in terms of approaches. The wonderful Gaber Mate says trauma isn't what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happened? Yeah. Does modern trauma research differentiate between the chronic developmental trauma we were just talking about, some of the attachment trauma, and then the what you referred to as the big T acute trauma? I'm wondering, how do you modify your treatment approaches based on those different presentations?

SPEAKER_00 38:35

Yeah, that's a good question. Uh synthesizing what I know about theory and research. You're right that everything is very um fluid and individualized, session to session, moment to moment. If I'm really doing the work well, it's moment to moment. Everyone's unique and I'm always like updating my sense of someone. But when you think of kids who have experienced trauma and relational trauma, there are some presentations I I look for being very easily overwhelmed by their emotional states, like adults that will become very easily flooded by emotional states, which I think is we'll investigate. Might that be body memory of a state where you were left alone in high distress and no one helped you co-regulate. I think when emotions feel so big and scary, one hypothesis I have is huh, could this be body memory? It was encoded as incredibly overwhelming because they were really little. And when we're little, emotions feel so frightening, especially if we don't have the mom and that anecdote from earlier in the hour that sits on the bed and says, Yeah, it was like that, wasn't it? Yeah, that did not feel good. And get the good myriad and attunement. I think about that with young trauma, with people who've experienced it young, that they may need a lot of containment when big emotion comes up. They feel panicky or start to dissociate, or feels like so much. You might contain with a little bit of psychoed, you're gonna contain with your own voice, not being too syrupy sweet and contactful. That can actually be a little scary because it's like they didn't get that before. It's the unknown, it's the unfamiliar.

SPEAKER_01 40:39

My understanding of the progression of trauma research has been that it's not about getting that catharsis of getting really poking at the trauma and getting it all out. That the research now very rightly is saying first it's about having the relationship, feeling safe with you as a therapist. That process, as you're describing it, you're saying that it might take someone some time before they're even comfortable with receiving that from you. Exactly. And one of the things that keeps coming up for me, even when I speak to people from different disciplines here, is just the importance of reaction. I recently spoke with Dr. Thomas Garten, the somatic coach for business executives, and Dr. Lewis Klein, the system scientist. And in both conversations, they talked about the impact of regulation on organizations and societies. What they ended up finding, and Dr. Lewis Klein has field research on this, was that it came down to this interpersonal connection and the trust and the safety between the you and the me. I was being slightly cynical, maybe, and they both took me to task a little bit, but I kept talking about how do you develop the capacity? I've been working in business over 20, 25 years, and I've come across lots of dysregulated executives. And in my mind, they don't have it. But both have pushed back and kept saying, no, Mary, it's not about capacity building. We have this, we all have this innate capacity. It's as you said from the very beginning, right? This connection with our caregivers and lying chest to chest. It's stuff that gets in the way of it. So it's not so much that this person, my capacity for math or something, but it's it's something that's innate in the human experience. And when there's an interruption, it's really about some other adaptation that's getting in the way of something natural.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

It's like that there's some kind of interruption to connect to connection, and then we have to form an adaptation. And that adaptation can look like micromanaging, compulsive eating, cutting, depression, anxiety, a critical voice, hypersexualized relationships, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But they're that's really well said. It's a it's powerful to reframe behaviors that seem problematic as some kind of adaptation to somewhere along the way there was a disruption with connection, and this was the best you could do at that time with what you were working with to protect yourself.

SPEAKER_01 43:15

I was like, what is the process we could create? What is the training? How do we fix this? And they responded to me, be attuned to them all season. It keeps coming back to we just need to treat each other better. Sounds very simplistic. You were giving examples here. You are really using your your nervous system all day long. You're such an empathetic and caring person. There's just so much one person can really take. It feels boundaries are really important. Is there a boundary with attunement for folks that maybe become too attuned to others? Is there something that is around no boundaries around attunement?

SPEAKER_00 43:55

Yeah, you know what it makes me think of that I think is really interesting. There's been Some suggestion in a in the field of psychology that it's theory, it hasn't been, there hasn't been like a randomized double-blind control study proving this. But people who it is a nervous system state to quote unquote over-attune to others. And let's think about um a woman in a domestically situation with her male partner. And we hear about all these trauma responses, and we hear about fight, flight, freeze. Some of us may have heard about submit or collapse and attaching and crying out for help. Those are some different trauma responses. And now people are talking about fawn, and it's been suggested in my field of study that is this nervous system state where there's a little bit of sympathetic nervous system mobilization. It's like a little bit of activation, it's not quite full-on fight flight, but you gotta be aware. And but it also is very modulated and regulated and socially aware and very astute, and it's let me regulate you because you look like you might hurt me. Kids have to do it with volatile parents. I used male and female violence, but this could happen in any kind of uh relationship, any gender combination. But that I would actually say is a little bit of a trauma response. Let me be so attuned to the sound of your hand on the doorknob and how what kind of state are you walking in with, and what can I do to regulate you so you don't blow up.

SPEAKER_01 45:56

Yeah, I can see the danger being that child and growing to be that adult. You really are so externally focused, you abandon yourself, your own point of view. It reminds me so many comedians had childhoods where they had very dysregulated adults and they became the little comedian because it calmed dad down or it cheered mom up. And a number of them, I think Dana Carvey and so many of them became the sad clown archetype. But then that becomes who you are, as we were talking about patterns and and how you be learn who you are. I'd love to switch gears a little bit. And you've had a distinguished career. You're on the faculty at the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. You also maintain your own private consulting practice. What drew you into this field originally and what continues to motivate you to?

SPEAKER_00 46:51

I think it's a function of my attachment background that one of my adaptations was to try to really understand people's motivations and why they do what they do. That's one part from my own shaping that I think makes me gravitate towards this field. And the other one, which is really sympathetical with our topic today, is so from my kind of attachment background that's helps me want to go towards this field is wanting to feel connected. And I like most about the process of psychotherapy. There are many things I like, many parts of my brain that light up and my analytical part, my conceptual part and solving problems part. But when we were talking about attunement and people's attachment injuries and the interpersonal space with the client and the therapist, I actually really love that. I also think we need to humanize therapists. We are human beings walking around in our own body with our own attachment history. I picked this because it resonates. I like talking to people, I like relating, I like listening, I like cheering.

SPEAKER_01 48:15

So I've been very lucky. I I think the very best therapists, and this is being a fans of folks like Gaber or Mate, who've had their own experiences, and therapists I've known throughout my life, is that those are the best therapists who are brought to the work because they understand it here in the heart and here in the mind. And also back to what we were saying about trauma research and therapy being so relational. Back there was a time where they used to call it like blank screen, right? Where a therapist would just be completely devoid of any kind of reaction or emotion. And that was considered the appropriate response. And what a lost opportunity for everyone involved.

SPEAKER_00 49:00

Here's an interesting thing to link this back to, because we've been talking about the nervous system and the human infant. Have you heard of the blank face babies? So there was research done.

SPEAKER_01 49:16

Some mommies smiled, some remained just emotionless aspect. And they did it. My understanding is they did it with babies that were just regular, just hanging out. And then they did also did that. And I think eventually this was the ethics board mixed this, but even a baby was in in discomfort or crying. They had some mothers that were allowed to soothe and some who couldn't. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 49:38

I recently watched a little bit of that video, and I just involuntarily, this wasn't without a lot of cognitive thoughts. Oh, that's so awful. My body, my nervous system, I just teared up because wow, you could see these infants with otherwise positive bonds with that was mothers in this infant lab, and they were doing research where the mom was playing and doing reciprocity and the eye contact and the that kind of back and forth play, and then went flat, and then they would cry, and the mom would still just be flat looking, and they did so many things. They arced their backs, they reached, they tried to be the clown, they tried to make mommy laugh, then they cried. And you could, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is this condensed version of all the adaptations we make throughout our entire life when connection breaks and all the ways we try to get it back. And it was so profound. And so you we now know one of the most distressing experiences for human beings as social mammals that co-regulate is being faced with someone's flat affect, blank face. It actually is a very like sympathetic nervous system activating. It can feel scary. Think about how they used to do psychoanalysis. You're lying prone. What if you have a trauma history where you were interpersonally victimized? That position isn't safe. Talk about body memory. Therapist is facing away from you, flat affect and not engaging. That is not co-regulatory.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

Decades and decades of people dealing with this. And then, you know, some of the examples at the beginning, even you discussing rupture and repair and sharing how even in your work, sometimes it's going to happen because you're two humans. That's a wonderful opportunity to teach and to deepen and strengthen the relationship and to model that healthy relationships do this as a process of growth. And it makes both people stronger and better for it. And so I'm so grateful that that you have found this field and that you bring your full humanness to it because I'm absolutely certain it makes you a fantastic therapist. This was such a wonderful conversation. As we start to wind up, I'm wondering if there's anything about attunement and rupture and repair, which I just feel I feel this is so important for everyone right now. And I feel like there are days where we're going to be stronger for it, that we can help others. And then there's going to be times where we're going to need to receive others' patience and grace from us. And normalizing this outside of a therapy context for folks to talk about. That this is the human experience. There's nothing wrong or bad about having these experiences, but there's so much we can learn. I'm wondering if there's anything else that we didn't touch on that you you might want to bring up. Thank you for asking.

SPEAKER_00 52:43

It's funny that you said that was in closing out. I was also thinking of all the things that we talked about, like attunement. And I would just offer to listeners, including ourselves, just a little felt experiment of moving through the next day or week, thinking about what it means to both receive feeling felt and to offer feeling felt. We have to reflect on our own experience. I think we have to go in before we can come out. Um, so give yourself permission to think about how do you experience that with people around you or want to. And then I think it would be a really healthy interpersonal challenge to for all of us to be like, okay, how can I help someone feel felt today? And pick a person a day. And it may be someone, you know, who's like trying to get the seat next to you. It's it, I think it would really push us to do with people that are strangers, but even I think this is how you change the world.

SPEAKER_01 53:53

I think what you're talking about is one interaction at a time. It really magnifies this energy. That person who you're kind to is going to be maybe a little kinder to the next person.

SPEAKER_00 54:03

And my one little thing I would add on is check out what happens when you have a moment of resonance with someone where you help them feel felt. Be curious what happens inside you. I know for me, it usually feels immediately pretty good. And like think about to make it somatic, it's like, what are how does your body tell you it feels good? Pay attention. How does your body communicate? It feels good to help someone else feel felt. Is it warmth? Is it tingling? Is it energizing? Is it grounding? I think that's a really nice reflection.

SPEAKER_01 54:41

That is such a beautiful takeaway in an exercise. And just as you're describing it and taking it full circle, we don't usually, unless it's something like something has a pain or an ache, we don't really think about the messages our body is telling us. And I love that you're really focusing on there's other messages than those medical or biological ones. There's other really important things it's telling you. And I cannot, I I wrote this down. It's gonna be the title of this episode, but feeling felt is just cool. Such a beautiful way of describing this. And it's yeah, thank you so much. Imagine I can yeah, I love it. And by the way, I think I completely everything you said about what brought you into your field certainly resonates to me and even why I do this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 55:32

I suspect, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:33

I'm like, I can I you of course you had me all read and analyzed stuff.

SPEAKER_00 55:37

We're just more just like and into just yeah, people who like this were meeting a need, or resonating with something.

SPEAKER_01 55:47

I don't know if you're familiar with the term ikigai, the Japanese concept of uh how to find your purpose in life. It's like do what you love, do what you're good at, do what you can get paid for, and then do what the world needs. And so I believe there's some sort of alchemy in having someone who wasn't heard as a child who then really wants to talk and then has a podcast and then talks about being heard as a child on the podcast. And it really is a way of exercising some of that, but also transmuting it into something that maybe someone's listening that's going to be a little bit different to their kid, or maybe there's a kid who grew up who didn't have that, who's gonna understand it earlier. I think this is how we show up in the world is to just to learn and grow. And luckily, you are in the world helping people learn and grow. And what a gift you are to your profession. Thank you. And you've been a real gift to me and so generous with your time and your expertise today. And I am really deeply honored and grateful. Thank you so much for coming.