Attached: A Different Lens, trust part one
Braving: why trust is where everything begins
Donna and Kirsty explore Brené Brown's BRAVING framework, trust between parent and child, and what changes when we finally feel safe.
Why trust?
This week it was Donna's turn to choose the question, and she chose trust. It was one of the first things she used to give the teams she led, because without trust there are no foundations. She knew that long before she had heard of attachment theory.
Her question for Kirsty: what is the importance of trust in parenting and in life?
They worked from Brené Brown's video on BRAVING, which Donna will share in the comments of the video. The acronym stands for:
Video not showing? Watch it on YouTube.
What trust actually is
What stood out to Kirsty straight away was a definition Brené Brown shares from Charles Feltman, author of The Thin Book of Trust.
Trust is choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.
Kirsty loved how much it covers. It also connects back to last week's conversation about mothers and fathers. To parent well together you need to know where the other person is coming from, where you align and where you do things differently. If you want to understand where your parenting comes from, you will probably want to learn about each other's childhood patterns, conditioning and trauma. That takes vulnerability, and it means trusting your partner, or your co parent, even if you are separated, enough to go there.
Then, day to day, comes the reliability and accountability. Are you going to do what you said you would do, or will I have to do it and end up resentful? And if it is not working, are we communicating about it, with non judgment, assuming the best of each other?
Trust between parent and child
Kirsty wanted to think more about the parent and child relationship, because it is different. Trust usually involves reciprocity, and with a baby it is much more one way. So early on, the question is whether the child is learning that they can trust.
Can I trust your presence?
Even the first letter of BRAVING, boundaries, is blurred between a mother and a baby. That comes further down the line. In the beginning it is all about presence.
- When I cry, does someone come?
- When I am hungry, am I fed?
- When I am excited or overwhelmed, is someone meeting me in it?
- When I am losing the plot, screaming and throwing things, is someone staying with me, or am I left alone with it?
That is the basics of attachment. Over time, as the child matures, they learn self responsibility, and so they can become trustworthy themselves. It is a gradual building of relationship, a give and take. First the role modelling, then the self responsibility, then the communication.
Repair is the most important part
An incredibly important piece is the ability to repair when there has been a conflict or an upset. For Kirsty, this is the most important part of trust.
When a child (or an adult) has a shaky foundation of trusting themselves and others, it can look like being very anxious and codependent. It can also look like being controlling, egocentric or power hungry. Underneath it can be, I do not feel safe in vulnerability, so I have built a shell of ego around me.
Kirsty's story: what distrust can look like
Kirsty chose to share something personal. She began with a disclaimer: this is not her saying she had terrible parents. We all have conditioning from childhood. What she will say is that communication was not optimal in her home, neither was repair, and she did not have a well attuned, reciprocal relationship with her father. That is context, not a judgment on them or on her.
An apology can feel like a small death
For many people, offering a really vulnerable apology feels like a small death. They would almost rather die than say, I was wrong, I can see how that hurt you. It is not usually because they are a terrible person. It is because they have not had practice with repair, and they have not built trust in relationships where you can be vulnerable, get it wrong, and it does not spell the end of the relationship or mean you are worth nothing. The ego is terrified: if I admit I got it wrong, it means I am bad.
Kirsty lived this when she was younger. She was empathic and forgiving of others, but when she let someone down she found the vulnerability of accountability so hard. In her teens and early twenties, some relationships completely broke down because the other person did not feel they could trust her, with good reason. She did not turn up for something, and instead of repairing she dissolved into a shame spiral and ran away. The shame kept churning inside, and every time she saw that person she wanted to disappear.
Power, control and shame
The other obvious pattern was around men. Kirsty described herself as having been the female equivalent of a womanizer, for which there is no word. Where does that come from? Partly craving attention and wanting to be valued. But for her it was especially about power and control. She had felt powerless as a child, particularly around the masculine, and at some stage discovered a way of having power over it. She names it herself as daddy issues, although she would not have admitted that then, because it is so cliché.
She was not a horrible person, but she acted in some pretty terrible ways, seeking power and feeling a distinct shame at the same time. She was truly sorry, but she struggled to apologise. There was betrayal sometimes, there was dishonesty. She was not trustworthy.
Kirsty shared this as lived experience of what can happen around trust. The old saying is that a leopard cannot change its spots, but there is always a huge possibility of change, especially when we are willing to look at what is underneath the behaviour, do the work, and have someone safe to confide in. She feels safe with Donna: Donna knows her now, and will not react with, oh my goodness, I did not know you were such a horrible person.
Meeting someone who felt safe
Just before she met her husband, Kirsty decided she was such a train wreck around men that she would stay away from them. Not long after, she met him at 21, and she felt safe straight away. Then came the fear that he would find out what she was really like. So she told him: you might hear some things about me, and to be honest, they are probably mostly true, and that is not who I really am.
He was just like, I know. In effect, I see you. That was why there was such a connection. He saw her, not the facade: not the glossy ego, not the bleached hair and the fake tan, not the person trying to keep herself safe. That is what they built on, and they are still together. There have been many layers to investigate and shed over the years, but fundamentally he saw who she was.
Donna was moved to tears, and also joyful. For her, letting the shadows out is one of the hugest things, because when the shadows are out the heart can be wide open. She said Kirsty was defining braving in that very moment: choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to someone else's actions.
Whatever your history around this, know that you can change, and you can build trusting relationships.
Kirsty Denny
Donna: when safe felt boring
This isn't love, because I had never felt love
Donna had the same experience when she met her partner. It was not the rollercoaster of the trauma based relationships she used to have. It felt safe, and it felt boring. It was like, this is not love, because she had never actually felt love before.
She was able to do the healing she has done because he took all the things she thought were horrible about herself, particularly being a fearful avoidant person with developmental trauma. There are probably people out there who would say she is a horrible person, because they met her in a trauma response, or when she was activated. And because she had none of the healthy parenting as a child, she could not repair after rupture. Once she broke a relationship, she thought she had broken it for good.
Someone recently asked them, after 24 years together, what the secret is. They both said the same thing: neither of us left. They have had some really rough times and have been really horrible to each other, but without even realising it was rupture and repair, they did it, because neither of them left.
The hands a child feels
Donna turned to the child, and to the work of Emmi Pikler. We are showing children love from the very start, which is why you cannot do too much for a baby. Pikler wrote about the hands, which are what a child feels in life. It starts in those very first moments, in how we take time with a child.
"Hands constitute the infant's first connection to the world (outside of nursing). Hands pick her up, lay her down, wash and dress and maybe even feed her. How different it can be, what a different picture of the world an infant receives when quiet, patient, careful yet secure and resolute hands take care of her, and how different the world seems when these hands are impatient, rough and hasty, unquiet and nervous. In the beginning hands are everything for an infant. The hands are the person, the world."
Dr Emmi Pikler
Donna looked back at herself as a first time parent, parenting with nothing, because her own trauma began at the start of her life. She thinks of the parenting books of the day, which she now sees as full of harm. She did not know how to parent because there was nothing in her kete to parent from. The power and control came from her lack of safety.
This is why we need to normalise the pendulum swing. While you are learning, you will go to the extreme of what you had. And, hugely circled on her page, was compassion. It is not one of the BRAVING letters, but as Kirsty spoke she wrote the word again and again.
Playing out our childhoods in our couple relationships
Donna has been doing more work on couple dynamics, and she has come across a model of six stages of relationship, taught in the Personal Development School programme and influenced by the work of Dr Susan Campbell.
The stage where people often think everything is going wrong is the power struggle, and Donna notices it arriving at about the 18 month mark. Put that back onto the child: it is the same testing stage as the toddler, when we look for autonomy and start dropping our masks and being our real selves. Are we playing out our childhoods through our adult couple relationships?
People often think the relationship is over at this point. I cannot be myself. I am scared you will abandon me. But what we are journeying towards is the later stage where we can be authentic with each other.
One safe person, and learning to repair
Donna laughs that in the relationship loops, her husband is still on his first wound and she is on her twentieth. Yet somehow he holds the safety for their relationship, and she has pulled him along on everything she has learned, without his having to go off and do it all himself.
The counsellor who changed the picture
Years ago, in a really bad state, Donna sought counselling with someone who was ahead of the curve and understood attachment. After hearing her story, the counsellor asked her to bring her husband to the next session. He thought he was coming to help with her problems, because she was the expressive one, the loud one, the angry one. The counsellor looked him in the eye and said he needed more help than she did: she recognises what is going on for her, and you do not recognise that you are part of it.
Donna is not sure she would advocate for what the counsellor did now. And he has given his permission for her to share this. He lasted two sessions, because he is the avoidant in their relationship. But somewhere deep inside he heard that it was not all her, and Donna thinks that saved their relationship. If she had done all of her work on her wounds while he believed nothing was wrong with him, she would have outgrown him. There is a real danger of that when you start this work.
Building the bridge: ten minutes after the door slams
He did not go down the rabbit hole of healing modalities as she did. But when Donna has a trauma response, and she can manage to squeak out, I am in a trauma response, he drops everything to create safety. He knows her body has taken over and she cannot support herself in that moment. He has learnt how to repair with a fearful avoidant woman.
In her heyday, she says, she was loud, noisy and angry, with plenty of I am fine, I am fine, I am fine, the danger words, because she was so not fine but did not have the articulation to say what she needed. She would slam the bedroom door. What he never saw was the swing that came next: sitting alone once the energy had gone, not knowing how to come back out.
So she taught him to build the bridge. Give it ten minutes after the bedroom door has slammed, then pop your head around the door. At first he refused, you are nasty! They had to learn the timing, and a few times he arrived while she was still activated and she snarled again, so he left and set his watch for another ten minutes. You cannot repair when one of you is activated. Eventually, he would simply sit next to her, no words and not necessarily touching. He did his healing in a different way, and it is all about trust.
- There are many ways up the mountain of healing.
- There are three different ways to repair, depending on whether you are fearful avoidant, dismissive avoidant or anxious preoccupied, and it may differ between your partner and your friends.
- Donna is incredibly grateful her husband did not leave. It is the only way she has healed: in relationship, with someone who trusted that she would get through it.
Closing this part
Donna thanked Kirsty for such beautiful, vulnerable braving. She wanted listeners to realise the gift: Kirsty showed them something very important to her, and in doing so she trusted everyone listening to look after that vulnerability.
Kirsty was clear that she is not absolving herself of responsibility for the ways she acted when she was not taking accountability. That is not what it is about.
The vulnerability is the gateway to repair and learning.
Kirsty Denny
They chose to pause there and come back for a second part on distrust.
Some things to ponder
No pressure to answer any of these. Just notice which one catches you.
- Which letter of BRAVING feels strongest in me, and which one is still growing?
- As a child, when I cried or lost the plot, did someone come and stay with me? What did that teach me about trust?
- What does an apology feel like in my body? Is it a small death, and what is my ego afraid it will mean?
- Is there a person who has seen me without the facade? What was it like to feel safe with them?
- When I am activated, what do I need, and how long do I need before someone can come to me?
- Where can I bring a little more compassion for the person I was when I had so little to parent from?
Meet Donna and Kirsty
Donna Stichbury
The Relationship Facilitator
PIKLER® Pedagogue and Circle of Security Facilitator
Donna is based in Pukekohe, Aotearoa New Zealand, and works both locally and online. She calls herself The Relationship Facilitator because her modality, Relational Flow, moves across every kind of relationship: adult attachment work, couples, parenting, and children's big messy behaviours.
Curious where to start? Book a free Zoom coffee chat with Donna.
Kirsty Denny
Kirsty Marie Energy
Energetic kinesiologist
Kirsty is an energetic kinesiologist and home educating mother of neurodivergent children. She uses kinesiology to work with the layers of subconscious stress and conditioning that can impact our ability to align to our truest expression.
When it comes to nervous system health and healthy attachment, she believes it all matters, the physical, the emotional and the spiritual, with healthy relationships with ourselves and others as the bedrock.
An invitation
If something here touched a tender place, you are welcome to sit with it for a while. There is no rush. You do not have to share anything before you feel safe, and you do not have to do it alone.
Donna and Kirsty welcome your feedback and your questions, and would love someone to join the conversation. When you are ready to talk it through, Donna would love to hear from you.
Book a Zoom coffee chat with DonnaMauri Aroha. 🌿
