 Hi, welcome to Ask an Expert, an interview series where we chat with experts ranging from clinicians to those with lived expertise. My name is Monica, and I'm a medical student with a strong interest in psychiatry and psychology. I really love these fields because they really give us a basis to start understanding ourselves and potentially our relationship with others. And with today's topic, the idea of attachment styles, if you've ever been keen to really understand how your attachment style could potentially influence your relationship with yourself and with others, then do join us for the next 30 minutes or so as we chat about exactly that. And with that as well, I'd love to introduce you to our wonderful guest for today's episode, Dr. Kirk Honda. Hi, welcome. Thanks. Glad to be here. Great to have you here. Would you like to tell us all about yourself a bit and the kind of work you do? Sure. I have been a therapist and a professor for 25 years in Seattle in psychology, marriage and family therapy. And 14 years ago, I started a podcast and YouTube channel in which we currently make about 20 episodes a week on all sorts of things. So all things psychology related and sometimes not, honestly. So that's me. Wonderful. And I also hear that you have a special interest as well in attachment theory and attachment styles. So shall we just delve right in? Yeah, let's do it. Amazing. I know a lot of people, especially in the psychological community, are quite curious to learn about the different types of attachment styles that there are. So shall we begin with a brief overview of the different attachment styles? Yeah. So I want to have a caveat, which is that a lot of the discourse and articles and YouTube videos about attachment styles online are good. And I can stand behind a lot of it, but it often gives a simplistic overview that people walk away with a simplistic idea, an introduction, if you will. And the general premise I want to state so that people can understand where it all comes from, where the theory comes from, from John Bulby and others that, and this is my model, this is the way that I think about it. And I use this not only with my clients, but I teach it. I use it in my personal life when I feel hurt by my wife, you know, something that she does. I sift it through my attachment model, which is thus that we are creatures and other animals as well where we have a stimulus. We have some sort of processing about what we re observing, what we re picking up, what we re perceiving. And then it will motivate, it will have maybe an emotion about that. And then we have an urge to behave in a certain way for survival, for procreation, this sort of thing. So we clearly evolved to attach, like a lot of other primates do. We evolved to seek proximity, that s what attachment means, seek proximity to attachment figures. Particularly when we re zero to five, but really throughout our life we re attachment oriented creatures, arguably more so than any other animal. And we thus evolved mechanisms of emotion and behavioral motivation to keep us close. So you can imagine someone s born 200,000 years ago on the African savannah, the Pleistocene, and that person genetically just doesn t have those mechanisms that drive them to attach to their attachment figures. And they wander off a little too far from the tribe and they get literally eaten by a panther or they fall off a cliff or they get lost and starved. And that would happen. And so we ve been selected for people that have tremendous emotions and motivations to attach. And so that s the basis of attachment theory. So when it comes to attachment styles, these are just descriptors, categories of helping us to understand the common styles that people will exhibit that is a reflection of that stimulus, emotion, behavior. motivation style. So when we understand the foundation, we don t necessarily slot people always into one of the four categories, because we only have four categories for attachment styles. And how do we count, you know, eight billion people on the planet? So that means that, you know, billions and billions of people are in one category. It s hard to do, but people are different. Everyone s different. So everyone s going to have a different combo. For example, for me, mostly secure-ish over time with a lot of therapy and a lot of work in my marriage and whatnot. And I have a dash of avoidance and a smaller dash of preoccupation. So what am I? Do you call me secure? But even that descriptor, there s a lot more to it. So attachment styles are when someone is avoidant, for example, like I have a dash of that, 10%, 15%, that when there s a stimulus of lack of proximity or distance emotionally or physically from attachment figures, so say my wife is stressed out and I get the vibe that she s preoccupied with other things and she doesn t have time for me to make me feel loved and appreciated, this sort of thing. So that s the stimulus. And then I have a perception about that, like, you know, and that can play a role, right, if I perceive it well, she s stressed out. That s a different emotional response. Whereas if I perceive it as she wants to leave me or she s cheating on me or something, then that s a different emotional response. So the perception of it, the cognitive perception of it, the schemas that is filtered through, I won t go into the detail on that. But so I have an emotion. So let s say that I go down a road of, like, I feel like she s rejecting me. Then I have an emotion which is hurt. You know, I feel hurt that I m being rejected because I evolved to feel that pain. And it s not just like intellectual pain. When we measure these things neurologically in monarchy, you might be able to comment on this since this is your era. We actually find that it s the same neurological pain processing in the brain that we go through when we actually stab ourselves in the arm. When we feel distance, it s painful. So, you know, I might feel that pain. And then I also have fear, anxiety about being left alone. I evolved to have those emotional responses to distance. Now, from there, God knows what sort of flowchart from those emotional feelings I might have. Because if I was younger, I wouldn t necessarily be aware of that pain. I would just, as an avoidant, oriented person, I might distance myself from my emotions so effectively throughout my life that I don t even recognize that I m having a feeling. But I start feeling certain urges in my brain. Like, you know, maybe I should tell her, maybe I should scow at her or reject her back or divorce or something like that. You know, certain urges, certain sentences went through my mind. But those are far down the line in the flowchart of the original stimulus and perception and emotion of hurt and anxiety. So, then my tendency from that emotion of hurt and anxiety, if I m avoidant, is to distance and to shut down my emotions. And say, I m okay on my own. I don t need anyone else. Okay, so that s generally avoidant. If I m preoccupied, then I would lean in and pursue. I might get angry at her and say, you re so distant all the time and you never pay attention to me or you get too stressed out by work or I might triangulate someone. I might call her mom and say, like, your daughter s being a jerkface. You got to talk to her. You know, so I m indirectly. Now, if I m more aware of my preoccupation, I might have a different reaction to that. So, that s general preoccupation is to be overly anxious and overly focused and overly desperate, I guess, which can result in a whole variety of behaviors. But it s more active, more noticeable. Avoidant people, you might not ever know they re avoiding because they ll just quietly become more independent and they seem fine. They might not even know they re struggling. Preoccupied people, typically they know they re struggling and it s obvious to people on the outside. But make no doubt about it, both avoidant and preoccupied people are struggling. Avoidant people just, they don t look like they re struggling, but they re struggling. So then, if we look to disorganized or what we sometimes call fearful, these people, it s sort of a special category of insecure attachment style. These people, early in life, were abused. They were terrorized by their attachment figures. So, sometimes it s described as a combination to avoidant and preoccupied. Erase that from your brain because that s just not accurate. The way to think about it is where it comes from. So, you as a two-year-old are, so you ll see this if you ve ever been around infants, that when they re scared, say a stranger comes into the room, they run to their parent. They run to their attachment figure and they ll hide behind their attachment figure. Or if you enter into a party with your child, they ll be quiet and they ll stick right by you. We evolved to do that. Now, that looks different when we re older, when we re 35. We don t necessarily, we might actually do that. But it ll be more of a, it ll look differently. But anyway, so when we re two, we seek proximity when we re scared. And from danger, so when we have some sort of indication of threat, we run to our secure base. Well, what if the threat is also the secure base? What if your parent is the threat? Where do you run? You don t know. You have an urge to run away from threat desperately and run toward the attachment figure, but it s the same person. The person that is threatening you is the secure base and the child doesn t know what to do. And so you ll see kids freeze in place. They ll dissociate. They ll flop on the ground. They ll scream. They ll sort of go back and forth. High distress, because they have nowhere to go. Avoidant people with preoccupied people, typically these individuals had at least some way of coping. The avoiding person went to the self. The preoccupied person clung to their parent. But the disorganized person, there was no way to know where to go. And so these people tend to be fairly in distress throughout their life. And so as they gain their adults, as they get closer to attachment figures like a partner, they start to feel that fear of, I m going to be harmed. And so they don t know what to do. They are desperate for closeness, as all of us are, but particularly them, because they ve never had it. But the closer they get, the more afraid they feel. And they ll interpret it as a threat. And they might even accuse their partner of doing things that they re not doing. And they can imagine things that are happening that aren t actually happy. It s not delusional, but it s emotional distortion, if you will. Secure is often misunderstood as people that are without problems. Secure is securely attached to individuals. They have no problems. They never overreact. They never avoid. It s not true. So every secure person probably needs five years of therapy, ten years of therapy. So just to give you an idea of what a secure person is in my mind. These people tend to, not always, but they tend to be less distorted. They tend to be able to regulate their emotions better. They tend to balance independence with dependence. They tend to know when to reach out and to whom to reach out to when they are sad and needy of other people. And when they need to, they can kind of depend on themselves. But there s a balance. But these people also have problems, you know? I don t know if you can hear a helicopter s flying over. I was right. It s a very loud helicopter. I ve never heard a helicopter that loud. Anyway, so secure people tend to do better in life, but they can certainly have and always do have relationship problems. So that s in a nutshell, attachment styles. That s amazing. I like the way that you break it down from stimulus, perception, emotion, and then covering just the summarized, like avoidant being the emotion, the reaction of being distant, preoccupation, being to lean in more, to pursue more, fearful. You just get a bunch of different emotions, like from freezing to dissociation, just not knowing what to do, because that safe person is also simultaneously threatening. And finally, the secure, less distorted, that balance between independence and dependence. Yeah, it was a great explanation. And I really like the way that you also brought in the idea, like the whole theory of kind of testing what a child would do in the presence of a stranger, for example. Because in my studies, I ve also come across that study. I think it s called the Stranger Experiment or something by Mary Ainsworth. And they brought in the parent. They also brought in the child, and then they would introduce a stranger and see what would happen, how they would react. So it s actually quite interesting, especially because they bring in children, assuming that a lot of this comes from, perhaps, like childhood experiences, rather than something that s genetic. I m not actually quite sure exactly, so I wonder if you have any thoughts about kind of the beginning of how people develop the Taj Mahal that they do. Yeah, so regarding genetics, it s hard to know the role, but there are likely different dials, if you will, that are turned up or down when someone s born, like someone s a little bit more sensitive, someone s a little bit more independent, so to speak. There are different dials that we have regarding our temperament. It s hard to know if that s true or not because we instantly start socializing children as soon as they come out of the womb. So thinking about that, but also, more importantly, attunement is the key. So when you re trying to avoid insecure attachment in children and adults, it s all about attunement. So attunement is the parent noticing the child s emotional state reasonably well, and two, reacting effectively to that emotional state reasonably well and reasonably consistently. So when you have that dynamic, then the child learns that they matter in the world and that they are okay, because if you re reacting well to the child s sad or grumpy or uncomfortable and the parent chastises the kid, the kid thinks there s something wrong with me, there s something wrong with my emotions, and I could go into all the different manifestations of problematic parenting. But when you have attunement, parent notices you reasonably enough, caregiver notices you, and responds well to you, which often just involves just reflecting, like, oh, I see you re uncomfortable. Can I help you with that? Or I notice that you re kind of grumpy today, or, oh, that is upsetting. I m with you. Just being seen by a parent is often just all that is needed. And through that, the child learns to believe that they re worthy as a human being. They also get to know their emotions. They also learn, oh, that s what that is? Because children, they don t know what their emotions are. They re just, you know, emotional, spontaneity machines. But when the parent says, oh, I see you re hurt, oh, I see you re uncomfortable, I see you re angry, or is this what you re feeling? The kid s like, oh, yeah, I guess I am kind of angry. And through that, they learn, I m okay, and I can trust other people. I can actually reach out. I can emote. And someone will be there to not harm me, and better yet, even just take care of me and notice me. So when you have that, then you tend to have more secure attachment in a child. And this will also happen later in life. So you can be raised relatively well and go through a really horrific set of long-term intense relational experiences later in life. And it can also alter your working models and your attachment style, so to speak. So when you have a problem with that, you have neglect, or you have inconsistent parenting, or abuse, or confusing parenting, or the parent is blaming of you, or gets overly angry with your emotions, then you start to figure out based on how things are working out for you that the secure base, that person, because, you know, not only do we run to our parents to be close to them, because they can protect us from danger and threat, but also emotionally we reach out to our parents, right? So we will cry, or we'll be uncomfortable, or angry, or happy, or joyous, or something. And we need the secure base to be there for us and to notice us. And when they're not, then we start to develop ways of coping with that, which we call avoidant, disorganized, and preoccupied. So for the preoccupied person, their solution at two years old, maybe even 18 months, was, well, in order for me to get more attachment security and attunement, I have to exaggerate my emotions, which actually means it would be best if I felt my emotions bigger neurologically, if I actually just actually had bigger emotions. And so neurologically, the child is conditioned to feel bigger emotions and express them very noticeably very often, and that sort of thing. And through that, they get, they start with, say, 20% attunement that they're getting and they bounce them up to 50%. They're still not 100%, but they're better off with that coping stuff. For the avoidant person, they're like, well, if I avoid attachment figures, then I don't have to feel the pain of it. And so it will reduce, I'm not getting more attunement because I'm no longer signaling that I need attunement, but the pain involved in the lack of attention is actually lessened. So overall, I'm better off by turning away and trying to turn away from my attachment figures. So in a nutshell, that's how all of this gets started. Yes, thank you so much for giving us an in-depth explanation of that. So it seems like, to me, the kind of attachment style that seems the most healthiest is the secure attachment style. And how can one, especially perhaps after unfortunate experiences, go towards that, change their mindset, change the way that they relate to others? So there are two pillars that I talk about, which is the two pillars of attachment-based therapy and also, to some extent, my style of psychodynamic therapy, which is that one is awareness and two is corrective experiences. So the first step often involves awareness. So the more you are aware of, you know, that stimulus, perception, emotion, behavioral motivation cycle, then you can intervene. You can be like, I have an urge right now to say, I want a divorce, but if I work my way back in the flowchart, given my new awareness of myself, I can say, well, I'm guessing that, okay, if I'm feeling like I want to yell, I want a divorce, I'm probably hurt and afraid. Okay, what am I, what caused me to feel hurt and afraid? Okay, this happened, and if I actually, and I'm assuming I can't tell my partner that I'm hurt or afraid. I'm assuming I can't tell my partner, you hurt my feelings. And so that's why I'm not saying that and instead I'm resorting to I want a divorce or some other veiled, passive way of trying to communicate that. I'm upset, but I can't be directly upset because I learned in my past that didn't work out for me, so I'm indirectly upset, but I've learned that I shouldn't do that, so I should be more direct and say, yesterday when you said this, it hurt my feelings. Maybe I'm over sensitive, I don't know, but do you agree with me? Am I okay feeling hurt? So that's awareness. So you're still having the urge, you're still having the reactivity, but you're intervening with some self-awareness. So this will get you about halfway down the road. The other half is corrective experiences, which means you experience relationships that are secure. Often we can do this in therapy with an attachment-based therapist or a therapist that is doing attachment sort of work, whether they know or do not honestly. Or in a relationship, spouse or relationship, friend or relationship, mental relationship, you experience someone that is attuned to you, someone that pays attention to you, that knows you, that doesn't punish you, that doesn't turn away from you, that cares about you. And it can be mutual, right? You can be in a spousal relationship and have that. Or in therapy, it's not that way obviously. But through that corrective experience, you actually change your assumptions about yourself and other people, and thus you change your attachment style. Because for example, with the preoccupied place, you're assuming that you kind of don't matter and the only way people will pay attention to you is if you kind of force the issue. But that assumption isn't always... It was true when they were three, but it's not true necessarily about their partner, their spouse. So if they actually go through a secure... an earned security, what we call it, then the assumption is like, oh, I used to really feel like I didn't matter and that other people had to convince them to love me. But I don't really feel that anymore because I've had three years of intense, noticeable love and attention even when I didn't demand it. So it's sort of retraining your brain and then after the corrective experience, which could for some people literally take 25 years of therapy, then you no longer have to be super self-aware of things because you no longer have the impulse to sabotage your relationships. Yeah, it sounds like it involves a whole... not just yourself, but it also involves the people that you interact yourself around to actually ultimately shape the kind of attachment style that you have. So it's definitely very interesting. And I know that you mentioned earlier, like the term psychodynamic. Is that the kind of modality you think that's the most kind of attuned to promoting awareness and corrective experiences? Or do you think other kind of modalities like CBT, DBT might also be appropriate? Yeah, so this could take a long time to describe, but generally speaking, yes, that... and there are therapists that call themselves attachment-based, so you don't have to look for another theory. But yeah, a lot of psychodynamic, but psychodynamic can mean a lot of different things, so it's hard to know what someone means by that. But commonly that does mean... and the phrase corrective experiences actually comes from psychodynamic therapy from the 40s, actually, psychoanalysis. And so, yeah. And then things like DBT, CBT, these kinds of therapies are perhaps oriented towards that first pillar, which is the self-awareness side. But it depends, because you could go to a CBT therapist and they would have no idea or really no orientation to help you with that. So it's kind of trial and error to some extent. But if you go to someone that's attachment-based that says, I'm attachment-based, you have a greater chance of that therapist understanding what I'm talking about. Okay, perfect. So attachment-based therapy is the... in of itself, the thing that could help. Would be another word, relational therapy. Relationship therapy. Okay, wonderful. Amazing. So essentially, I think, yeah, we're about 25 minutes in now. We, in sum, for those who have been watching, talked a bit about the attachment style. We gave an overview, just a bit of a background of where that might come from and kind of practical tips towards moving towards a secure attachment style. So that is essentially what we talked about if there are any questions that would be lovely to leave them in the chat and then we can see if we can answer some of them. Otherwise, I would love to direct some of the Psych2Go viewers to check out Dr. Honda's very own channel, which is linked in the description box below. I'll just give it a few moments to see if there's any other questions that might come up. Otherwise, we will definitely see you all next time for the next episode of the Ask Next Word series. Let's see. It doesn't look like there's any questions, but if any do come up, just leave them in the comment section below and I'll do my best to direct your resources, direct others to Dr. Honda's very own videos as well. And yeah, hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you, Dr. Honda, for joining us. Thank you to Psych2Goers for watching and hope you have an amazing day. Yeah, thanks for having me. Bye.