Diane Poole Heller: “The Surprising Superpowers of Insecure Attachment”

Diane Poole Heller: It’s worth it—for yourself and for everyone you’re involved with—to move in that direction and embody secure attachment. I think if heads of companies, heads of countries, and everybody committed to learning secure attachment, it would be one of the fastest ways we could transform humanity into a truly loving place within a generation or two. I’m an idealist. I’d love that to happen.

Tami Simon: Welcome, friends, to this episode of Insights at the Edge. My guest is Dr. Diane Poole Heller, an internationally recognized expert, author, and speaker specializing in adult attachment theory and trauma resolution. For decades, she studied and worked alongside trauma pioneer Dr. Peter Levine, serving as a senior faculty member for Somatic Experiencing International. She went on to develop a signature framework to help therapists and individuals heal insecure attachment patterns and develop secure attachment skills, called DARE: Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning Experience, which is what we’ll be talking about today. Diane Poole Heller is the author of The Power of Attachment, and now has a new book in Sounds True’s Inner Workbook series called The Attachment Workbook: Practical Exercises to Understand Your Patterns, Strengthen Connection, and Build Secure Relationships. Diane, welcome.

Diane Poole Heller: Welcome to you too. It’s great to see you, Tami, and I’ve loved my connection with Sounds True and with you all these years. I miss you in Louisville, but I’m glad to have a reunion with you today.

Tami Simon: As a way for our listeners to get to know you, can you share a bit from a personal perspective how you first became so devoted to trauma healing and the work of somatic experiencing, and then how that evolved into your focus on the DARE framework?

Diane Poole Heller: Like many of us on the human journey, I had a very challenging trauma history personally, and I couldn’t find anything particularly helpful. I was really struggling and feeling isolated—I was even going through the Yellow Pages, back when we had Yellow Pages, looking for help. That dates me. I was looking everywhere and getting little tidbits of help here and there. But when I finally connected with Peter Levine, it was like a godsend. His work with physiology and his understanding of trauma is so beautiful, and it helped me personally, tremendously. I used to tell him, if you ever have a cancellation, I’ll be there—I lived in Colorado at the time, and I’d jump up and do a lot of sessions with him. I’m eternally grateful. Along the way—I started in 1989, so I’ve been doing this a long time—I loved teaching it. I taught Somatic Experiencing internationally for about 30 years; I was in Europe more than in the United States, in different countries around the world. That was a lovely opportunity. But when you go to different countries and work with their core traumas, it’s not like collecting postcards when you travel—you get to know the essence of that country, its history, its people, and their view and culture. I found that endlessly challenging but also fascinating.

Along the way, with a lot of ups and downs and twists and turns, I realized that the hardest thing to resolve completely was really restoring somebody’s ability to connect to themselves authentically after a really difficult life experience. Most humans walking around have had some difficult life experience—it seems to be part of the plan. Another short definition for trauma is broken connection. So I got very interested in how we restore a relationship to ourselves that’s kind and loving and nurturing, and also how we open intimately to other people in our lives—partners, children, special friends, or really any human. That seemed to be the sticky issue that was hardest to resolve.

I had a near-death experience during a surgery—I only had about a 10 to 15 percent chance of surviving. When I came out of that, which wasn’t expected, I felt like I was on bonus time. I had a very clear message that I needed to learn more about love—all types of love, divine love, personal love, just regular old love. I also felt I needed to support anyone bringing light into the world. So we built a company around our work—the attachment work, but also hosting, kind of like Sounds True does so well, though way better than anybody, I think—to bring attention to anybody authentically adding to healing in a wonderful way. It’s had a silver lining; there have been so many blessings on that journey.

When I realized that broken connection was such a core issue for most of us—even without trauma, it’s a pretty big issue—I wanted to go back to the very beginning: how do we start our relational imprint? Attachment theory was beautiful for that, and I loved John Bowlby’s perspective that it’s biological. We come with it as part of our biology, just like thirst and hunger and other things natural to us. Attachment and connection are biologically in us. What I love about that—as opposed to many people who write about attachment, because this isn’t always the viewpoint—is the idea that you already have secure attachment; we’re just trying to clear the debris that accumulated from difficult caregiving circumstances, medical procedures when you first arrived, a natural disaster, being born into a war zone, or being born into famine. There are lots of things that can contribute to our early attachment patterning, but for the sake of time, I’m primarily focusing on what happens in caregiving styles and how to help the system recover. The attachment system is very resilient. That’s what I want everybody to take away from this, if they can: there is so much healing that can happen, because there’s a part of you pushing forward toward healthy attachment. We’re just trying to help clear the way for that part to dominate over any attachment injury you might have experienced.

Tami Simon: It’s interesting that you say it’s a very resilient system, and at the same time, for many of us it can feel like we have gum stuck on the bottom of our shoe. It can feel like, “This is the one thing that imprinted on me so early—how could I possibly shift it? It’s wired into my nervous system.”

Diane Poole Heller: It is wired in—that’s absolutely true. But if you start to bring in what I’d call secure attachment priming—if you present secure attachment as a therapist working with a client, as a partner with your partner, or as a parent with a child—it’s a big invitation to pull secure attachment responses. There’s research showing that if you’re in reasonable contact with someone who has learned, earned, or recovered secure attachment—or who already started out with it—for about a year to a year and a half, you’ll naturally start to move into your own secure attachment. That’s because being around someone who responds from a secure base has a deep impact on people.

If you start working on it consciously—which is part of why I wrote the book, and especially why I wrote the workbook—you can learn it. That’s the cool thing. It’s not like having a limitation that can’t be changed. But you do need either someone around you who’s responding from a secure attachment perspective, or you do your own homework. We all have to do our own homework, in my opinion. It helps to have it if other people are in it with you, but if you do these practices—I had to do them myself, so I’ve lived this journey, I’m not just making this up—you can pass on what’s particularly helpful. That’s why we call it Dynamic Attachment Re-patterning Experience. It’s very experiential, in terms of how you show up and what you pay attention to, to move toward secure attachment.

The strange thing about relationships is that we almost assume we should just know how to do them. I think it would be more helpful if schools had relationship training, communication training, and repair training—maybe even more than algebra. I love math, but unless you’re going to be a mathematician, I’ve never really used much of it beyond the basics. Relationship skills, though, I use every single day. So I’m hoping this goes viral, in a sense—that more and more people learn it and find the nourishment that comes from it. Work, for most of us, is a little more concrete and figureoutable. But our relationship life is so important—it’s where we experience most of our love, including our relationship to ourselves. Whether you’re in a relationship with another person or just relating to yourself, how you relate to yourself makes a gigantic difference in your quality of life.

Tami Simon: I want to circle back for a moment, Diane, because I never knew you had a near-death experience. Was it, in many ways, the origin of your focus on love? I’m curious—tell us what happened.

Diane Poole Heller: I probably could be classified as a workaholic. I love my work, and I was doing a lot of it in my thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. One of the ways I coped with my trauma history was to work—it was a positive outlet, and it also made me feel good, especially once I understood trauma and could help people. I found that very fulfilling. But from overworking—anybody who travels the way I did, training, a day off, then another training, another country, another country—I look back and think, you were insane, girl, what were you doing?

I got sick, but only at night, which was strange. During the day I looked fine, so I kept telling my organizers something wasn’t right, and they’d look at me like, “Oh, you’re fine,” and give me homeopathy or something. I was far more ill than that. It turned out I had gallbladder disease, which is usually a fairly simple surgery. But because I was so work-focused, I kept thinking I had to finish the training first—which was foolish; I should have been in the hospital. By the time I got home and sought treatment in the U.S.—which I also shouldn’t have delayed—the gallbladder was so inflamed there weren’t clear margins. During surgery, they cut into things they shouldn’t have, without realizing it. They were going to release me, but I was in such extreme pain—I didn’t even know you could feel pain like that. Because I have this personality that always looks like everything’s okay, I couldn’t communicate my distress well. I learned that from this experience: nobody understood how dire my condition was, either when I was teaching or in the hospital when they were about to release me. I told them I was in terrible pain, and they eventually realized the pain cycle had gone so far they couldn’t control it anymore—not even morphine touched it.

They brought in a different surgeon, who in his fourteen-year career had never made a surgical mistake—he made three on me, cutting into organs he wasn’t supposed to. When they realized what happened, he came in and apologized profusely, and I immediately went into trauma-therapist mode and started taking care of him, which was ridiculous, considering he’d nearly killed me. It was a strange situation. They thought they lost me on the first surgery, then on the second, and then I developed sepsis, which is extremely dangerous—they thought I wouldn’t make it through that either. They were calling hospitals and experts around the world trying to figure out what to do, because they’d never seen a case go that wrong. They had no idea what my prognosis would be. I wasn’t allowed food or water for fourteen days—only a saline drip—because my internal organs had been so damaged they didn’t know what would happen.

I can laugh about it now, but it was a major thing. The takeaway is that I got practice going fairly far into a death experience, and I was okay with it. I had this equanimity—it could have been dissociation or drugs, too—but I felt like I’d done enough, that it was good, that I was ready to go and it was time to rest. I wasn’t fighting it, and I wasn’t trying to come back to life either. I was pretty far into the experience. For whatever reason, I came back out of it—they weren’t expecting me to, and then they didn’t know what to do for my recovery, because they said they’d never had a situation like it. It was bad; it was really not good. That experience made me stop traveling, because I couldn’t anymore, and that’s when I created an internet-based education platform for therapists and everyday people on how to heal trauma and attachment injury. So the blessing that came out of it was huge—it gave me so many gifts, and I could do the work without traveling. I either had to retire or find something meaningful to do, and that was around 2012, at the very beginning of when that kind of online work was even possible. We didn’t have great software back then, but I really enjoyed the opportunity.

Tami Simon: Part of why I asked is that it relates to re-patterning. I think a near-death experience can be a tremendous re-patterning of somebody’s soul trajectory—it sounds like that happened for you in some way, too.

Diane Poole Heller: It definitely did. The interesting thing was that coming out of the death experience, what I hit first was everything in me that wasn’t resolved. It was this massive totality of everything in me that felt untrue, that felt fraudulent—I felt toxic. I thought, oh my God, this horrible experience of all this unresolved stuff in me. Fortunately, I have a wonderful spiritual teacher, and once I could finally talk again, he helped me. He told me to just stay with it. I thought, you want me to go further into this awful feeling? But I did go into it more, and then it just broke open into what we call a holy city—a holy city of pearls, full of authenticity, resiliency, and love.

Part of the mission that came out of that experience was a very strong directive—from wherever it comes from—about learning all forms of love: personal love, generic love, divine love, everything about love, and embodying it as much as I could manage, learning about it, being it, seeing it in other people, and helping bring it forward in others. I had such a huge experience of love as our basic nature. We have other things connected to our true nature, but love is, I think, a foundational human capacity. Yet we can get so hurt, so disappointed, so let down. If you think about attachment injury, what we face coming in with our families or our world circumstances isn’t always particularly supportive, nourishing, loving, or empowering.

So I see it this way: we have our attachment system, which we carry biologically, but we also have this true nature of love. It’s like moving the debris out of the way—peeling back what’s in front of it. When somebody develops a good relationship with their wound—like I had to go further into my own toxicity and tolerate it—it moves to something much more real. That’s happened for me so many times, so I really trust the process. When I’m upset about something—and I can get really upset about things, like anybody else—I ask myself, why am I so reactive to this? Instead of putting all my energy into blaming the other person for whatever they did, I try to pull back and ask what’s really going on. That tends to be a shortcut to finding out what was missing in me, even if it got triggered by someone else.

Tami Simon: If we all have this core wiring for secure attachment within us, how early in our incarnation experience does our adaptation to a sense of “I’m not sure it’s safe around here” begin?

Diane Poole Heller: I’m not a researcher, but from my own experience and from working with so many people, I believe it starts in utero—at the very, very beginning of incarnation. There’s probably past-life material too—karmic material, who knows all the different things that happen across a human incarnation. I didn’t believe in reincarnation the first time I heard about it either, so I understand the skepticism, and I can’t prove any of that. But from an attachment point of view, as a fetus you’re like a little sponge: you’re taking in your relationship with the body you’re in, with your mother, and with the relational field around her—what’s happening between her and her partners, what’s going on in the world. You’re sensitive to all of it. They even say you download a lot of your mother’s emotional states, taste preferences, and other information, absorbed along with nutrients while you’re in utero. Then, when you’re born, you’re very vulnerable but also very impressionable.

Think of yourself as a relational sponge—you’re taking in what’s happening between you and another person, but also what’s happening with other people around you: the relationships between parents and siblings, maybe grandparents. A lot feeds in. A family can have roughly the same dynamics and three different kids will internalize it differently—one might emphasize a certain thing because it was especially impactful, while another sibling doesn’t internalize it the same way. That’s not uncommon.

Tami Simon: The classic literature on attachment theory describes three different types of insecure attachment. You can introduce them to our listeners quickly so people are tracking with us—but I wondered, is it really that neat and clean? Is it really three categories you fit into? It seems a little too cut-and-dried to me.

Diane Poole Heller: You can have a mix. I myself have a mix of all four—which actually helps me understand all of them from that perspective. I think the truth is most people have a mix of attachment styles. We have an attachment quiz on our website; based on your answers, you get a qualitative sense—almost a pie chart—of your mix. I think it’s unusual for someone to be just one attachment style. But when we’re sick, tired, sad, or angry, we tend to default to certain behaviors in certain relationships. You can be in a relationship with one person whose style pushes you into avoidance, and in a relationship with another person whose style you react to with anxiety or ambivalence. It’s malleable depending on circumstance, which is one of the reasons it can also heal—you can learn secure attachment skills. The more you respond to yourself internally, and to other people, as you learn different aspects of secure attachment functioning, the more it changes the outcome of your relationships and how you choose who’s in your support system. When you understand what secure attachment is, you start to think, “This person isn’t really willing to come with me on secure attachment,” and you have to decide how much energy to put into that relationship.

Tami Simon: As a way of introducing the three insecure types of attachment—in the workbook, you talk about how each one has a superpower. I think that’s a good way in, because often when we think about these styles, we think only of the negative relational behavior they produce. But they also give us access to something, as you said, like a superpower. So go ahead and introduce the superpowers of the avoidant, ambivalent, and disorganized attachment styles.

Diane Poole Heller: Avoidant attachment tends to develop from growing up in an environment where the people who were important to you weren’t present, or were actively rejecting—think neglect and rejection. There’s also another cause: when the person guiding your childhood is only interested in left-brain functioning—teaching you to read, write, ride a bike, cook breakfast—but doesn’t have much emotional resonance with you, there’s not much right-brain activity. The attachment system needs right-brain-to-right-brain connection to really develop, because it’s deeply relational.

But the superpower that can come out of that is: people with a lot of left-brain focus—sometimes even an overfocus—tend to be super smart, and because they don’t find relationships nourishing from the start, they can learn that later. They tend to be very self-reliant and self-sufficient, though in a somewhat isolating way. On a team, they don’t get distracted by the emotional dynamics among other members—they just get the job done. They’re highly productive, because they aren’t distracted by emotion; they don’t have as much access to their own emotional states. They have a way of shutting their attachment system down, so they’re not disrupted while getting the job done. We need people like that in our society—people who are highly productive—and they often get rewarded for it. They also make great teachers; they’re very smart.

But underneath that, their reaction to the pain of neglect or rejection, or to being overly task-focused, was to give up on relationships—to essentially shut down their attachment system. That’s not easy to do; it’s like stopping an instinct, like saying you’re never going to feel hungry or thirsty again. Not feeling your need to connect is a giant stopping of something very big. So when they start to lift that brake, they become very vulnerable, because everything in them says, “This isn’t going to go well, I’m going to get hurt, the person won’t really be there.” When somebody coming out of an avoidant adaptation starts to feel their longing to connect, it’s really important that the people around them—a therapist, a partner, whoever—are truly present and allow nourishment to happen, so they can come out of the pattern more and more.

Tami Simon: I want to underscore something you just connected that I’d never thought of before. When you talk about the avoidant type, and say that if the family environment was overly task-oriented and overly thinking-oriented, without right-brain-to-right-brain connection, that can actually be experienced as a relational trauma—a kind of “no connection here.” I never made that connection before; people don’t usually talk about that part.

Diane Poole Heller: It’s really important, and I can tell you’re not the first person to say, “Oh yeah, that happened to me,” or “I get that—I can see why that would be hard.”

Tami Simon: Very helpful. So the avoidant superpower is productivity—the ability to get things done on your own.

Diane Poole Heller: Exactly—”I’m going to do it, come hell or high water, and I’m going to get it done.” I obviously have that myself, which is part of why I ended up with the terrible gallbladder situation—I had to get that training done. Looking back, it was foolish; I should have been in the hospital. But anyway, yes, the superpower is productivity, and really seeing what needs to happen to get a task done wisely.

Tami Simon: Okay—the ambivalent, or sometimes called anxious, attachment type. What are its superpowers?

Diane Poole Heller: The ambivalent adaptation comes from a lot of inconsistency. These were often parents—or anyone in a caregiving role—who would stand back, so to speak: they had the garden, the good stuff, but as soon as the child started to relax into their love and care, the parent would drop them energetically, probably because of their own attachment history and wounds. So it’s there, and then it’s not there. It’s there, and then it’s not. That creates a lot of anxiety, because you think, “They’re here, but I know they’re going to drop away. How will you be here tomorrow?” The on-again, off-again pattern happens often enough that it creates insecurity, and it produces more anxiety than reassurance.

So what they need is reassurance. But instead of shutting their attachment system down, they amp it up—to try to stabilize the relationship. They can come across as needy and clingy, even though that’s not who they fundamentally are; it’s a behavior that comes out of repetition. The experience gets programmed in: “I can only regulate if you regulate me—I can’t regulate myself.” Everything is other-focused, whereas with avoidant attachment, everything is self-focused. So they try to manage or meet all your needs, doing everything they can to keep you in the relationship. If they don’t hear from you for a while, they immediately go to, “They don’t love me, they don’t care,” straight into an abandonment wound that affects their behavior a lot. Unfortunately, they often want relationship more than anything, but can become so demanding about it that they push away the very person they most want to be close to, which is heartbreaking. But that can heal, too.

In terms of superpower, they’re highly sensitive to any relational cue. I remember my own mother, who definitely had ambivalent attachment—I was getting off a plane, and my grandmother was there too. I hugged them both, and my mother started crying because I hugged my grandmother a second longer. They tend to interpret everything negatively, whereas the avoidant tends to interpret everything positively, because they’re mostly in denial. The ambivalent is scanning for “when are you going to let me down,” wondering, “Am I really your person?” They take any tiny misattunement to mean something huge—”You don’t care, you don’t love me, I’m not lovable”—really hurtful conclusions.

As they heal, they develop an incredible capacity for attunement. Once they’re no longer driven by “Am I lovable? Are you there or not there?”—once that’s stabilized and they’ve moved toward secure attachment and trust again—they still have this amazing capacity to know what you need, often before you know it yourself. They bring incredible empathy into their relationships. Part of their healing is learning to bring that same kindness to themselves, since they’ve been so other-focused. When they start being kind and caring toward their own humanness, that’s really beautiful, too. They become incredibly attuned—they “get” you, and you can feel it when somebody really gets you; we have sophisticated internal equipment that tells us whether someone truly understands us or not. It’s really exquisite. They can be real, authentic, and beautiful in that way.

Tami Simon: And then the final insecure style and its superpower?

Diane Poole Heller: Disorganized attachment is the most complex and least predictable—it doesn’t have an actual pattern, because it’s intertwined with unresolved trauma, which can take us in all different directions: fragmentation, dissociation, dysregulation. The main task is helping a person regain a sense of connection to safety, because they feel very unsafe. Even relationships feel dangerous once they hit a certain level of intimacy—they get a major internal message that this is going to be bad, danger, danger.

Healing disorganized attachment really requires two kinds of work: working with the trauma history that’s feeding all that fear into the system, and finding what I sometimes call an “ally oasis”—people who are actually trustworthy and safe—so the attachment system can start to orient toward safety. That’s a big part of the healing; it’s complicated, so I’m trying to describe it briefly. This is the pattern most often associated clinically with personality disorders, or with the kids in school who always end up being sent to the principal, which reinforces their feeling that everything’s unsafe. There’s a lot of research on how these patterns get reinforced unconsciously, even by teachers, in school settings. If people understand how to meet an attachment difficulty the right way, it leads to healing; if they reinforce it instead, it just gets more embedded.

But when someone with disorganized attachment heals—and all of these patterns absolutely can be healed, I really want people to hear that there’s a lot of hope here—they develop an ability to be stable, to help themselves and others regulate, and to embody a sense of safety and security that they can transmit to people who are distressed. That’s huge.

Tami Simon: Now, Diane, we’re getting to what I really want to talk to you about. I was reading about the DARE approach, and from what I understand, it treats attachment wounds as physiological trauma actively stored in the body’s nervous system, and helps the body complete trapped survival responses. I want to learn more about that completion of responses. You’ve described how these adaptations get trapped in us, creating insecure patterning, and how, once healed, we can access these superpowers and keep them with us. But how do we complete these defensive responses that are stored in our bodies?

Diane Poole Heller: First, it really helps to have a partner or therapist—someone who knows about attachment cues and can perceive when they’re not happening, when they’re blocked, or when they’re overactivated or repeating too much. Let me give you an example. I worked with a woman in Germany, lovely woman, whose best friend happened to be taking the same training at the same time. We were doing a boundary exercise, with them standing far apart, but what I was really working with was gestures for connection.

When she came up to do the demonstration, she said she had a partner who was never available, never wanted to be with her—which is sometimes true, sometimes it’s really the perspective of ambivalent attachment, and you don’t always know which until you work with it. I asked her, “How do you invite him into contact?” She looked at me like I was speaking another language. I asked, “Do you say something? Do you gesture? Do you have a ‘come here’ look in your eye that invites connection?” She said she didn’t know what I was talking about, which was itself a big indication that that capacity was turned off.

So I had her best friend—someone she already knew, loved, and trusted, and who posed no danger to her—stand in position, and asked how she would invite her friend into contact. She just froze; her whole body froze. I thought, okay, we’re in trauma territory, definitely a freeze response. As we were talking about it, her left hand flicked—just a tiny movement. I asked if she’d noticed, and she said no. We tried again; the same flick happened, which looked like the beginning of a gesture—maybe a “come here,” or a reaching out—but it was totally frozen. I said it seemed like part of her body was saying it wasn’t okay to reach out or beckon, and asked if she had any idea what that might be about. Immediately, memories of sexual abuse by her father or stepfather came up.

We worked with that—of course her body would say, “I’m not going to beckon anybody, because that’s going to be bad.” As we worked through elements of the abuse, her arm kept gradually moving into more of a complete gesture. The incomplete movement had been that she couldn’t beckon, couldn’t reach. That motion kept getting stronger, and eventually—without getting into the whole session—she was reaching toward her friend with a gesture that clearly said, “Come here, I want to be with you,” a gesture that hadn’t been available to her before, for very good reasons, given what happened to her when she was younger. That’s an example of how interlocked these things can be, and probably an example of disorganized attachment specifically.

It’s the same with trauma work generally: if you understand physiology, you notice things like an exophthalmic eye—like in cartoons, when someone’s eyes bulge—which is a threat response, hyperfocused on the environment to protect against danger. You work with eye position and other physiological cues to help complete what’s incomplete. Nothing is wrong with us; there was some intelligent reason we stopped our attachment system, or overfocused on it—there’s always a reason that makes sense—though you don’t always have to know the content. She happened to remember it was sexual abuse. I’ve seen it happen other times, too: I had someone doing the “kind eyes” exercise from the workbook, where you look out into the world to notice kind eyes. She could do that part easily. The second part of the exercise is bringing that kindness into your own experience, into your body, embodying it. As she tried to bring the kind eyes in, she hit something like a wall—a membrane that stopped it. We stayed with the membrane, letting her be curious about it and feel it; she hadn’t even known it was there until the exercise. Then she remembered that her stepfather used to look at her with a sexualized gaze when she was a young teenager and developing, which really frightened her, and that he would come into the bathroom while she was showering. We worked with that, and the membrane started to melt and eventually disappear, and she could bring in the kindness and love that was actually already present in her life—she had just been repelling it because it was associated with something traumatic. That’s what I’m always looking for: what’s happening, and what’s not happening, because either one can signal something that could be addressed and really help.

Tami Simon: One of the premises of The Attachment Workbook is that you can visualize completions of certain responses—or you take people through an exercise where they visualize a different welcome-to-the-world experience, or redo their birth experience, or bring in a protector when they needed one. Just through the power of visualizing and really feeling the visualization, you can start to shift the patterning inside you. I wanted to hear more about that, because it can sound almost too simple—”I just visualize it?”

Diane Poole Heller: My strong conviction is that we’re all designed to heal—we have incredible resiliency, and the work is learning how to tap into it in a way that actually works. That’s what I’m trying to communicate in everything I write, including the workbook. It can also help to do some of these exercises with a partner or therapist, because the presence of someone you trust, love, or simply feel good with can help you stay with something that would be difficult to stay with alone. We tried to build in different avenues, because some people want to do this work on their own, and some want to do it with a partner of some kind.

I believe it’s Deepak Chopra who calls it the “imaginal realm,” or something close to that—I can’t remember his exact phrasing—but it’s very powerful, and there’s additional resource available in a relational field if you’re doing it with someone else. I once did a radio show with a woman who was something like the “therapist of the stars” in Los Angeles, and I had her do the kind eyes exercise, which sounds so benign—just look out into the world and see kind eyes. The exercise is in the book partly because of my own history: my mother went through something after giving birth to me—maybe postpartum depression, though they didn’t have the language for it back then—and went into an angry, hateful state. Whenever she looked at me, there was this hatred in her eyes. So when I’d meet someone for the first time, I’d have a delay—I’d have to look at them and get through that remembered “hate look” before I could actually see them. I was on a kind of delay, which is common for people with avoidant attachment. Some people with avoidant attachment look at your chin when they’re talking to you, because they never had great eye contact—either vacancy, which is terrifying to an infant, or actual anger or hatred. Looking at someone’s chin means you can’t quite tell they’re not looking at you.

I’m trying to heal that attachment gaze with this exercise. The radio host did the exercise on air with me, and when I spoke with her a couple of days later, she told me she’d gone home and cried for two days—she was grief-stricken by what she remembered about how eye contact had felt for her as a kid. I told her I was glad she let that grief process happen, that she let those emotions move, because that’s actually healing. Emotion moves us forward if we can tolerate staying with it, and she could. She told me it was interesting—now she could actually see people, see them seeing her, and see herself seeing them. It sounds funny, but the attachment gaze is very powerful. When I’m in therapy with someone and they begin an attachment healing, their eyes lock onto yours in a way where you can almost feel nourishment moving back and forth, eyes to eyes. That’s different from a schizoid kind of eye contact, where someone looks at you as if they’re trying to pull your soul out of your body—in that case, you want to break eye contact, look away, and work with that dynamic differently. All of these attachment elements—gesturing, eye contact, and many others we address in the book—are about bringing things back online and clearing out the trauma, misunderstanding, lack of attunement, or whatever kept you from feeling truly seen, truly related to, or appropriately understood in a way that made sense.

It’s about understanding the components of secure attachment, and what gets in the way of each one, and then designing a workable exercise to address each component—eye gaze, gesturing, dealing with difficult emotions, mourning what wasn’t there for you as a kid, and so on. Going through the workbook, you pick and choose which exercises are relevant to you. Some might feel easy—”Oh yeah, I do that, eye contact doesn’t bother me at all”—but you have to pay attention, because on the surface it can feel like no big deal. I had a client, gregarious, cute as a button, lots of friends, effervescent—like a little champagne bubble—who, once we got into the work, couldn’t take anything in. It was a recipe for suffering: she had all this love around her but couldn’t feel it.

Tami Simon: I want to ask the question again, slightly differently, because it’s one thing to practice this with another person—a mentor, a therapist, a friend, an intimate partner—but it’s another thing to do it alone with the workbook, imagining things, redoing them. For example—one exercise from the workbook I found really helpful was imagining a protector who was there, intervening on my behalf. I could pick a spiritual guide or a figure I really trust, and I saw that imagined figure stepping into a situation and changing it, treating me differently, and it was really powerful. How does that work so well?

Diane Poole Heller: We call those corrective experiences. Part of what I’m searching for—what someone is searching for in themselves while doing the work—is: what was the unmet need? If you were in a bad situation with no protection, then importing protection into the memory is going to make a real difference. This is such a foundational piece of the work, because it’s about bringing in the right resource to meet what was missing, or to address what happened that shouldn’t have. Bringing in a protector—for a moment when you were unsafe—doesn’t matter who the protector is; it could be your own protective energy, a Marvel character like Batman, someone from a movie who embodied protection, or an ideal protector you make up yourself. Everybody understands that concept. Once that protective energy comes in, it starts shifting people’s physiology almost immediately—they feel more supported. We can take it further: what would you want your protector to say or do, related to whoever was offending, or to the situation itself? People can always come up with something; I’ve never worked with anyone who didn’t have words or actions they really wanted. Some of it is a little violent, and that’s okay, because you’re not actually hurting anyone—it’s imagination. Some people lean into revenge fantasy, which can be interesting. Sometimes it’s simply the feeling of support, of having somebody behind you, so you can finally say or do what you needed to in a situation where you were too young or too small, and the person who hurt you was too big and powerful for you to ever succeed against.

Bringing in that aspect of yourself, or another figure, into a difficult situation starts to heal it—it gives you enough resiliency to heal. Some therapy approaches rely on a “no pain, no gain” idea, where you just stay with the pain. I think staying with your suffering, aligning with it, is helpful, but my strong opinion is that you need resources and resiliency to actually be able to do that. That’s why we focus so much on bringing in what wasn’t there, or addressing what was there but shouldn’t have been, as a corrective experience that helps a person integrate the healing.

Tami Simon: One of the points you’ve made strongly is that secure attachment is a skill we can develop—a kind of learning. So if I take an attachment assessment, like the one you offer, it might look different five years from now than it does today. It’s not a fixed label—we’re evolving as we build skills and grow toward secure attachment. Is that right?

Diane Poole Heller: I’m really glad you’re framing it that way, because the truth is, you’re not stuck in your attachment injury. It’s like anything else—you can heal. If you cut your finger making dinner, you put on a bandage and some antiseptic, and your body is designed to heal. Your emotional state is designed to heal. Your attachment system is designed to heal. My own attachment situation is drastically different than it was when I was a kid. My nickname from my sister was “zombie kid,” because my mother was somewhat violent—she’d go into these outraged, scary states, breaking things—and I would just freeze completely in the middle of it and go somewhere else entirely. My sister’s nickname for me was fitting, even if it doesn’t sound very nice, because I would immediately dissociate and freeze. That doesn’t happen in my life anymore. I’m so much more relational now; I was very shy as a kid and didn’t even know how to talk to people—I was socially awkward all the way through school. A lot happened to cause that. But now my nickname is “the connector”—wherever I am, I’m bringing cool people together, easily initiating friendships, and I get comments on it all the time: “Wow, you really live this secure attachment thing.” I do—that’s kind of my thing now. It’s highly learnable, though that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

When I was married, my husband once told me, “I really love you, and when I’m being loving toward you, you deflect it.” I got angry—”What do you mean, I don’t do that”—and went to bed. In the middle of the night, I woke up and realized: I do deflect it, and it was really hurting him that I wasn’t taking his love in. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I also realized I didn’t know what to do with love—I hadn’t grown up in a loving environment, so it made me too vulnerable; I didn’t know how to take it in. I gave myself a practice: to stay present whenever anybody was kind to me, not to disconnect, not to deflect a compliment with something like, “Oh, this old thing.” That took about a year and a half of concentrated practice—I considered it a spiritual practice, staying present in the presence of kindness and love. You’d think that would be easy. It’s not, if you came from a disorganized place.

Understanding these patterns, and knowing how to work with them, is what I’m hoping will be a contribution of the books, because it’s so doable—it really is—but it takes time and commitment, and some work is involved. It’s not like you read about secure attachment once and decide, “Okay, I’m doing that now.” There are reasons it may not be immediately available to you, and it’s important to understand that compassionately rather than use these categories as labels. It’s not helpful to say, “Oh, you’re an avoidant,” or “Yeah, you’re doing your ambivalent thing.” That’s not helpful. I hope people don’t use this information that way—it’s meant to help us understand ourselves compassionately and kindly, recognizing some of the things that got formed early on that aren’t serving us now.

Tami Simon: And the last point I’d love you to talk about, Diane, is that a couple of times you’ve mentioned it can even be between you and you. I think sometimes people believe, “I want to heal my attachment wounds, but I don’t have a partner right now, so I guess I can’t work on that”—and they’re missing a lot of what’s possible on the healing path.

Diane Poole Heller: That example I gave earlier—with my husband—was really a “me and me” issue, because with his feedback, which I didn’t take kindly to at first, I recognized I needed to work with this deflection I do, this disappearing act whenever kindness or love shows up. Because otherwise, I’m never going to feel loved—it’s a recipe for suffering. I decided that I would stay present in the presence of kindness or love. That was something I worked on, Diane to Diane, and the outcome was huge.

You can take all the different elements of secure functioning and work with them personally, with kindness rather than judgment—that’s really important, staying in a compassionate space. For example: how protective am I of myself in not-great circumstances—maybe someone around me doesn’t have good boundaries? And how protective am I of other people, of other humans in general, especially people I’m close to? When I’m in an argument with somebody, am I concerned about my own safety, but also about the safety of my partner or my kids? Can I communicate in a way that’s safe for me but also safe for the people I’m interacting with?

Another part of secure attachment, which is kind of fun, is playfulness—a hallmark of secure attachment. Can you have play dates with your partner that you actually honor, where you go out and enjoy things? Can you be playful with your kids, or take yourself on a “play date”? I call mine creative days—I go out in Santa Fe, or wherever I am, and just respond to what’s happening, join a festival I didn’t know was going on, go to an art gallery. Can you allow playfulness into your life? Can you be present with yourself in different circumstances, and present for other people in an authentic way?

If you take the list of what secure attachment looks like, you might be doing seven out of ten really well, with three that still don’t work so well for you. If you put some effort into those—like learning to make repair, because a lot of us grew up in families that did difficult things, or were misattuned in some way, or just never really saw us or got us—you can learn how to repair. Learning how to say “I’m sorry,” or to acknowledge, “When you asked me that question, I got irritated and was really abrupt, and I want to redo that—I hear that you’re concerned about this, and I want to hear more”—that kind of “redo” is incredibly valuable. Repair is one of the most important things to learn. John Gottman did wonderful research on relationships, and he found that you have an 85 percent greater chance of sustainable relationship well-being in your important relationships if you learn to initiate and receive repair. If you got that kind of return anywhere else, you wouldn’t even bother spending money on Starbucks—everything would go straight into the bank. The return on learning repair is gigantic, and it’s a core secure attachment skill.

Tami Simon: I’ve been talking with Diane Poole Heller, who has just released a new Inner Workbook with Sounds True called The Attachment Workbook: Practical Exercises to Understand Your Patterns, Strengthen Connection, and Build Secure Relationships. Diane, what’s your wish for the workbook as you send it out into the world?

Diane Poole Heller: I’m wishing that people find it helpful, and that it helps them learn and experience secure attachment, because it’s a gift that keeps on giving. It affects everybody in your relationships—even the person bagging your groceries at the store. Living from secure attachment is a gift to yourself and a gift to everyone around you. It’s worth it, for yourself and for everyone you’re involved with, to move in that direction and embody it. I think if heads of companies, heads of countries, and everybody committed to learning secure attachment, it would be one of the fastest ways we could transform humanity into a truly loving place within a generation or two. I’m an idealist—I’d love for that to happen.

Tami Simon: I think you and I are both people who did a lot of work to make secure attachment part of how we relate to others—it wasn’t the way we came in. I’ll speak for myself, and having heard your story, it’s proof that it’s achievable, if you really focus on it and make it a priority.

Diane Poole Heller: It’s worth it.

Tami Simon: All right. Thank you, Diane. Thank you so much.

Diane Poole Heller: Thank you—it’s great to be here, as always.

Tami Simon: Thank you.

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